In my current circumstance at home, I have a lot of trees. But I decided to establish a Telescope Parking Position anyway. We got a couple of clear nights in a row so on Friday April 10, 2020, I sought establishing my parking position. I purchased 6 stakes to hammer into the ground for the three legs of my Celestron Advanced VX Mount. I aligned the telescope to Polaris using the Polaris Pointer and adjusting the position. I checked the level of the three legs and adjusted to the level position accordingly. I hammered the three stakes into the ground and proceeded to do a star alignment with my StarSense accordingly. I couldn’t do an auto alignment due to the trees so I did a star alignment. I chose Arcturus as my alignment star. Well, I went back to the telescopes home position and tried to see if I could get back to Arcturus and it I was succesful in finding the star in my finder scope but not in my ocular. I tried calobrating StarSense but I am not sure if I followed all the instructions correctly and once again found Arcturus in the finder scope. I didn’t think I was perfectly aligned but I saw the moon rising in the trees and decided to have StarSense go to the moon. I was happy that it traveled to the correct direction but ended up just below the moon but not within finder field view.
At the suggestion of members in my astronomy club, The Raleigh Astronomy ClubI purchased the Celestron SkySync GPS Accessory. I think it actually helps give you a correct starting point.
I have been struggling to get my StarSense to find targets as easy as Celestron shows in the video but have not been successful but I will not give up. I now see that in the past I did not level my tripod. I also think the date had been wrong.
The other day I was listening to the ALPO podcast and they pledged if they mentioned the Covid-19 virus in the podcast they would drink a shot of whisky. I didn’t mention that in my whole article….oops
Stake 1
Stake 2 Tripod 2
Stake 3 Tripod 3
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Celestron 8″ Edge HD Telescope