C-8 Advanced SGT Alignment on CG-5 Equitorial

[bigastronomy]

I'm having a heck of a time aligning my scope properley. I've set it up facing North, lined up my marks, leveled the mount, and zeroed in on Polaris with the dials that allow the scope to move straight up and down (the ones for zeroing in on your latitude). Then I go through my 3 star auto align and usually choose Arcturus, Vega, and either Deneb or Altair (normally due to the FOV I have in the backyard).

For whatever reason, when I'm done aligning and select objects from the remote it doesn't slew to them accurately. Sometimes it is sort of close and sometimes it is quite a bit off. I'm guessing it's user error but I can't figure out what's going on. Most of the times if I slew to an object and can't find it by panning back and forth I'll try to see if my mount is still lined up and ask it to find something like Vega (or one of the other alignment stars I chose) and it won't even settle on Vega correctly. Help?

Also, are the dials for R.A. and Dec that have degrees on them supposed to be used just to check where your scope is pointing or are they supposed to be adjusted somehow?

[admin]

hey bigastronomy,

how did the trip go? Have you tried different stars? My guess is that you have to carefully center each star. Ive been checking out a nexstar goto system and once you go to a star for the align, you can change the rate to very slow (on a scale of 1-10 choose down to 1). Then fine tune the star so that its dead center. If you do this for all the stars in the staralign, you should be hitting the Goto objects dead center.

[bigastronomy]

the trip went ok, my buddies were impressed of the views of the moon and jupiter but then the clouds rolled in so we ended up doing a little night riding on the atv's and the polaris rzr so it was still fun. i've gotten away from the astrophotography a little bit just to spend more time behind the EP and getting used to the scope and mount.

I set the North star to center in my EP and then I align the alignment scope cross hairs with Polaris once its centered and go from there on each star so I'm not sure if that's it. Although, the only thing I can think of is that sometimes I center the star just on the inside edge of the crosshairs on one of the quadrants for tracking purposes and if I'm not aligning in the same quadrant each time depending on the angle of the scope if that would be enough to do it.

do you think that would be enough to throw it off that much?

thanks,

big

[bigastronomy]

you know, i just don't get it! actually, i do. i always assume user error when something goes wrong. i swear i did everything the same as i did last time but tonight, my alignment is spot on! i swear, this scope is going to either drive me nuts or keep me learning, most likely both. well, i'm going to continue to gaze, i'll let you know what i come up with. i already spotted m-11, my favorite star cluster (since it's the first and only i've been able to spot so far - FOV limitations in the backyard and learning curve) and spotted the andromeda galaxy. i'm going to play around with stronger eyepieces on the andromeda galaxy hopefully w/o sacrificing too much FOV to see what i can resolve here in the somewhat outskirts of the city.

who's scopin' out what tonight?