I’ve spent the last few nights trying to align my scope. When I first put up the pier and the custom adapter I used the transit of the sun to do my alignment. One the mount went on I used Meade’s two star alignment to refine the setup. I was able to get the alignment to where the Autostar controller said the I was within 5′ of North. Still some goto opertations brought my target within view while others were off the field of view. I also used the “park” command and then powered down the scope. The first night I came back and tried to slew to M31 the scope was off. At the end of that night of viewing I also “parked” the scope.
Last night after I watching “Seeing in the Dark” I initializing the scope and tried to go to M31 the scope slewed to a position below the horizon. Luckily the scope did not strike any object.
I was a little discouraged however I went to work trying to use the “sync” command which is done by centering and object and holding down the “enter” key for 2 seconds. When the key is released the Autostar controller prompts you to center the object and press “enter” again. This seemed to work pretty well. After the “sync” I was able to slew to M57, M31 and Vega with pretty good accuracy. The clouds rolled in fast and I once again “parked” the scope. The alignment marks on the mount body were perfect on the RA and only slightly off on the DEC. We’ll see how well the next session goes.