Hi Steve,
Hello freom Greece. Well the summer nights are now getting longer. Enjoy them while they’re here. For you, the frost of winter will come all too soon. BTW, Southern Comfort is great to restore the circulation after a cold night out under the stars.
Here in Greece, I’m muddling through and have become thoroughly disenchanted with SkyWatcher. They have a great design and excellent firmware but choose to save a few pennies using inappropraite materials that cause a lot of failures. e.g. mount power cord dissconnects at will, even worse the hand controller also disconnects when every it whishes. When its working the damned thing is 100% right on and keeps on target for at least an hour but that’s when it working. Hopefully all the modifications I’ve made to theSkywatcher mount and tripod will do the trick or the Skywatcher will be an expensive 200 euro mistake They’re so bad that they knocked Meade off my Shit List. I do hope their scopes are better built.
For what its worth. One thing I’ve found is that the SkyWatcher SynScan Alt/Az GOTO Mount and Tripod marketed in Europe is different from that marketed to the rest of the world. The European Version has a lot less features but does have 40,000 more objects in its data base. The world version has only 4 thousand objects, but can work in the equatidoral mode, correct for cone error, has many more alighment optins, a time chip in the handset, etc.
The portability issue with my iOptron NOVA/CG5 GOTO mount is looking like less of an issue each night. I now have it assembled and ready to go with my C6S back on and hopefully will be able to take it out tonight or tomorrow night. I say hopefully as it seems unexpected guests drop in each night and …. Now if I can only remember how to set it up properly.
1. vertical axis of the tripod orthogonal to the plane of the earth (carpenter level not the innacurate CG5 bubble level)
2. mount and scope polar aligned (north star centered in mount and scope; close enough).
3 three star align (high power eyepiece).
4. fully charged power pack
Leave anything out?
Joe
6:53 pm on July 19th, 2009 1
At last, got to take my scope out. Set up and did a two star align using the loosen the clutch method for the first star recently discussed on the iOptron Yahoo forum. Worked like a Champ.
Then I went down my list of 43 Messier objects. The NOVA GOTO pegged all but one, M30 and it may have gotten it but the light pollution from Athens was especially bad tonight (high water vapro content in the air), I even forgot to pull out my 12mm eyepiece several times and was pleasantly surprised to see the object in the field of view.
BTW Steve, your webb site is looking great.
Joe
Sxinias Greece