HELP! With new German Equatorial Scope

[TheFacelessMen (Rob)]

Hi All ,

I have been a telescope user on and off over the years starting out with a cheap but nice quality small Vixen refractor on a wooden tripod with manual controls and later using a couple of smaller Meade and Celestron SCT's on the fork mounts

Based on a lot of positive reviews I have recently taken the plunge to upgrade to a takahashi mewlon 250 and takahashi em400. As this did not come with a GOTO I decided to purchase the SkyFi wirless controller and SkyVoyager software to provide goto control using my Iphone.

Apart from spending too much money , I didnt think about or realise the setup differences between the fork mounts and german equatorial mounts so now am in a little bit of a bind about how to properly setup and align both the mount and optical tube

I found a good article on here about setting up a german equatorial mount which has help a bit for setting up the mount but I still cant seem to get correct alignment at the eyepiece.

1. Is there something more/different that I need to be doing to better align the mount??

2. Should I be orienting the Optical Tube in any special position on the mount ??? The takahashi does not seem to have any special home position.

Any advice to help me would be greatly appreciated

[bmitchell82 (Brendan)]

that is some very very nice bit of kit you have plunged into. Setup differences there are some. for a start the em400 isn't small but in saying that isn't hard to get going.

depending on what you want to achieve with the setup (visual/astrophotography) is the difference in setup that you will need to look at.

they are different to set up but in saying that once you have some time on the board it isn't hard and doesn't take too long. I can setup my eq6pro and 10" ready for photography within a hour to hour fifteen from scratch so that should give you an idea