Telescope Reviews: yet another 1st light post ETX-80

I guess you could call it 2nd light, as my first session was with the sun, but tonight we finally had a clear evening (sort of). Conditions were poor...too many porch lights and to my eyes there was just a slight hint of fog which caused considerable dewing of everything. (visible stars were to perhaps magnitude 3). By the time I had the scoped aligned, the 9.7 and 6.4 eyepieces were covered in dew.

Onto alignment. At first I thought the scope was defective, as it consistently kept slewing several degrees off target. I loosened and retightened the clutch and attempted alignment several times. No luck. I then decided to check the time setting in the scope...it was an hour fast. So, I reset the clock and did another alignment. First star it took me to was Arcturus. It slew there and was off by about a 2 or 3 degrees. I nudged it into view and hit enter. Next stop was Vega. It too was off, but only perhaps a degree this time. Repeated the nudging and entering.

Now for the goto test. I gave it an easy one (seeing that I'm starting from Vega), I told it to take me to M57. It whirred a bit and I think it took me there, but with the ocnditions and being limited to 26mm eyepiece I'm not certain. There did appear to be a star that wouldn't come quite to a point.

Next stop was Deneb...again a bit of a whir and there she was, just a bit left of center in the eyepiece; that helped to increase my confidence about M57. For one more easy test I told it to take me to Albireo. A bit more whirring and there it was, this time just a tad off center (but not much). It was tough to seperate them with the 26mm (I could see the gap, but not the color). I flipped down the barlow and they looked much better. Blue and orange to my eyes. Very pretty...one of my favorite doubles.

Next I jumped around to several objects: Antares and M4 appeared together in the eyepiece (with the globular appearing as a tiny fuzzy ball). M3, M4 and M11 (more fuzzy balls), M39 (not impressive, but couldn't use magnification and by then the objective lens had picked up some dew).

Overall, I'm impressed. The goto worked very well and I had a lot of fun slewing to the object and then reading about it on the autostar. It was also pleasant being able to walk away from the scope, take a peak at my atlas and walk back and still have the object in the FOV. And I have yet to calibrate the motors...the scope is just as it was out of the box (except for assembly and batteries of course

). Under darker skies and better conditions (or at least less dew...tonight had to be the dewiest night I've ever observed in) this telescope should perform admirably.
Craig