Very good advices Gary, thank you very much.Gary wrote: If you align the telescope correctly and relatively accurately, once located, the object (e.g. Saturn) should not move out of the field-of-view (FOV) so quickly. The telescope system should automatically start tracking (not guiding) the object until a new one is being selected. Maybe your alignment is not accurate enough and you also use a high magnification narrow FOV eyepiece which create this effect of Saturn moving quickly out of view. Try a lower power wider fov eyepiece initially to check how good is your alignment and keep improving it until it still stays within the fov as you use higher power and narrower FOV eyepieces.
Congrats on seeing Saturn! Try observing it through a binoviewer in the future.
I can see the truth behind that evil smile He He He
Indeed very useful explanations bro cloud. Thank you very much too.cloud_cover wrote: The term "guiding" refers to using a separate CCD and (usually) guidescope to enhance the trackign accuracy of a mount in order to take long exposure pictures. Its unnecessary for visual use.
"Tracking" refers to the mount moving in tandem with the sky, by means of its gears and motors. very different.
Simple GOTO alignment is easy. Ensure your mount is level and pointed north (use a decent compass or a known landmark). Connect battery and power on. Next, command your mount to slew to your intended target (preferably a star or planet). At this point it will probably point off. Correct using the slewing commands on your handpad until the object is centered in your eyepiece. Now hit whatever command on your handpad tells the mount that you are aligned with your target. You have just done a one-star align and your mount will be significantly more accurate than if you had not powered it on at all! as you continue your viewing session, you can slew to and align each consecutive target to enhance the GOTO accuracy. You needn't do it all at once so instead of thinking of aligning as a task, think of it as a process throughout the night of observation
Autoguiding uses a CCD to detect the tiny errors in the mount tracking and is not needed for visual work. For example, in a 10mm plossl eyepiece (with 50deg apparent field of view), you would have a true field of view of about 1/3 degree (50/150x mag), which is about 20arcmin or 1200arcsec. Now if your PE is 40arcsec over a period of say....6 minutes, you would expect to see your target oscillate a distance of 1/30th of the field of view (40/1200) over 6 minutes, an imperceptibly small amount to the eye. To a CCD though, each pixel represents about 1 arcsec so this movement is obvious and a long exposure picture becomes ugly. Since your eye isn't bolted to the eyepiece (ouch!), it makes no difference when using it visually
Yesterday night sky was very clear and i managed to power ON the mount!!
I am still learning!