I live in Melbourne, so the magnetic deviation may not be the same so you will need to check that out. I only purchased my scope in January last year, so I have only had my Celestron 8 inch GoTo for a year. After initially worrying about how accurate it needs to be, I read all the information etc on alignment and decided to try, after a couple of months, what I call the "plonk" method as I just wanted to "get out there". Note this method will allow you to align quickly with enough accuracy, for me at least, that the objects you slew to will be pretty close anyway, always in the finder and often in the view even at 100x, I drop it to about 30x if I can't find it. It will be good enough to show people things in the time it takes to slew and a few seconds to center it. It will be useless if you want to take long exposures or have the scope aligned for hours on end. I used this method in Ballarat at the star camp and I aligned the scope at 9pm and was still able to slew accurately at 1am, when the battery went flat. But I did take reasonable care that the initial "plonk" was pretty accurate. I did not change the lat/long in the hand controller though, so the scope still thought it was in Melbourne! So this is what I do:
I asked if anyone on the group knew the deviation from magnetic south for Melbourne and use this figure to set the tripod up. When looking to the south, true south is about 12 degrees to the "LEFT" of magnetic south, so I use a compass to find magnetic south and then turn the tripod around until the line through the polar axis is pointing about 12 degrees left of this position. If you have a large area to set up, you could find something in the distance with this bearing and set the scope to point to this, but my back fence is about 3 meters maximum from the tripod so it is pretty hard to get a bearing to that. As it turns out, I have found with experience it actually is not that critical anyway. I have even estimated the bearing with my eye, and the alignment has been good enough to work for an hour or so, but I have had to do a lot of manual fine tuning each time. If you are looking at bright objects, the alignment is less critical as it will be pretty easy to tell what needs to be centered manually.
I have set the graduated scale on the altitude to as close, by eye, to Melbourne (can't remember, but about 30 something) as I can. Usually I will also level the tripod, although some times I have not, and it does not appear to have a huge difference, but it only takes a few seconds and is usually worth doing.
Then I go through the usual alignment procedure. I select the 3 star rather than auto as my yard has a lot of trees and often I cannot see the star it is asking for. That's it. From start to finish, it takes about 10-15 minutes to set up the tripod and align the computer. The BEST thing I ever bought for the alignment was a laser (you need a permit too in Victoria) and a bracket to mount it (I have a Lumicon, but they are all pretty similar, some people even use tape!). Before then, it could take more than half an hour just to line up the three stars and I am afraid my back is getting past it...I was at school when they landed on the Moon.
I have a polar scope, southern hemisphere, but have not used it yet. To get details about how to use it, I found several great articles, albeit complex, on the yahoo group for advanced series scopes. These guys can also help with any specific questions for the mount and control software you have. I just tried
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Celestron_AS/ but the server couldn't find it, maybe it is down at the moment. From my backyard, in the "burbs", on a clear night I can just make out the fifth star in Crux, often only four, so finding the pole star from my place would also be rather difficult anyway.
Looking at the link to the scope, your mount appears to be the same as mine so all this should work as well for you as for me. If you want to get more serious, you will need to refine the alignment procedure, but so far this has worked well for me and is very quick. There a methods to slew to pole and adjust the mount with the adjustment screws and so on that I have see, but so far I am happy enough.
If you let the technicalities put you off too much, you will miss out on the best part of having a goto - being able to look at dozens of things in the evening, and the GoTo just leaves so many people dumb founded when they see it working, just a bit of a pain when there is so much glow in my yard that you can't see anything, mind you, I could read the newspaper while waiting for the slewing
. I always check the info first to ensure I am not slewing to a magnitude 12 galaxy!
Aligning scope
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L.
