Telescope Reviews: Recently purchased Nexstar 6SE & have a problem

Here are some ideas:

Make sure the tripod is level.

Make sure the telescope knows its in the right time zone and has daylight savings properly set for your area. Many people fail to set the clock to the right zone! The default is PST, which isn't applicable to most of the world!

Make sure your finder is aligned with the scope by lining it up on a stationary terrestrial object like a house light. Don't trust the finder to be in alignment just because it was the previous night.

Make sure your GPS has linked. You have to be patient sometimes. Then select the three brightest stars you can find, hopefully distributed in 3 different areas of the sky.

After moving by hand with the clutches disengaged to get in the area of the first star, make sure the clutches are tight. Then use the arrow keys to move to the first star.

A possible, but less likely, reason the alignment could fail is that you are not getting the stars close enough to the center of the optical path, so the algorithm in the scope's computer can't quite fit them to its internal map. I'm not sure what the error tolerances are, but if your enough off center and it's taking you a bit of time to go through the routine, it might fail. For each star, first "center" it, which means get it in the field (near the crosshairs of the finder, which should put it somewhere in the eyepiece field), press "Enter" and then get it exactly centered in the scope's eyepeice before pressing "Align". Use your highest-power eyepiece and defocus the star so it is a large round ball and is concentric with the edge of the eyepiece field. That's the easiest way of making sure it's close to center. If it's moving because the scope is not yet tracking, hit the "Align" key when it has exactly reached the concentric position. Alternatively, you could use a high-power illuminated reticle eyepiece to find the exact center but that's going to add $80-$100 to your cost (Adorama is advertising one for $77.95). I use one and I find it really helps.

Also, make sure you are at full power, because if the voltage is low the computer is very unhappy and does some strange things.

My general advice is to learn the names of 10 or so stars on the entire Celestial globe and then you can use Auto 2-Star align, which is faster and just as accurate. I did a SkyAlign the first night out with the scope (a CPC, but same electronics and software I believe), but haven't done one since.

If you are looking at the moon or a planet, just do a SolarSystem Align and it will be good enough.

Keep trying. You will succeed! Then, of course, it will get cloudy and rain.

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