Hello everyone! I've known about this site for approx 48 hours.
It came recommended by the guys over on a ham radio forum.
As a ham radio operator and under 40 this will be long winded and hopefully with enough technical verbiage to sound like I know what I'm talking about.
My equipment.
Meade LDX55 AutoStar 497
8" f/4 FL=812mm
Meade 25mm-Eyepiece
Orion Sirius 6.3mm eyepiece
Orion Sirius 10mm eyepiece
Meade 2x telenegative eyepiece
Meade 3x telenegative eyepiece
I bought this kit from a friend of friend for 200 bucks and it came to me "built".
I only used it a few times in the past 2 years and manhandled it around to look at the moon. It just looked cool in my ham shack!
Last week I decided I'll bring it out. Hey look the moon again. I knew Jupiter was close enough so I moved it around and WOW there's Jupiter and it's 4 moons!
OK time to get serious.
I order a battery pack
Canon camera adapter for my T7i
Light pollution filter
Moon and planet filter kit.
I decided I didn't know nearly enough about this this so I took it apart to the level that it would have been shipped to me directly.
Put it back together.
Excellent learning experience.
Set my latitude.
Balanced it.
Took it all outside and centered the spotting scope with a house about a mile across the lake.
Yesterday my battery pack shows up.
Plug it in. Initializing.
Date/time/daylight savings.
OK
But I couldn't navigate to where to change the location in the menu (user error). But the previous owner lived in Michigan as well. So I wasn't that concerned.
I take the tripod outside and align the star on the leg North. Being and Eagle Scout I have an actual compass.
Mount the motor assembly and counterweights.
Mount the scope.
Wait for dark.
About 9:45PM Polaris shows up.
Using my Iphone and Skywalk app which I calibrated to the moon and Jupiter I verify it's Polaris.
Turned on the AutoStar.
Entered date and time to the second. Daylight savings, yes.
Then it prompted me to set polar home.
I had the scope all set in polar home position. But I was too high on my elevation angle. No big deal, loosened the Lat lock and came down a few degrees.
Then I used the slew function (maybe my mistake here, reading the manual again it seems I'm supposed to do this by unlocking the RA and DEC locks) to line up Polaris. I had to move it very little as Polaris was already in the 25mm eyepiece.
Clicked enter on the key pad and it said "locating Arcturus" and it starts to slew that direction. (AWESOME!)
Again I check with my skywalk app, but that is a bright star and pretty easy to locate. Nonetheless I'm a ripe newb and wanted to be sure.
It slows down, and slowly centers Arcturus. It beeps. Per instructions it says to slew the scope to center Arcturus.
So I do that. First with a 25mm then with my 10mm.
ENTER.
Now it's locating "Capella" Slews over to that. This time it's a bit closer to center. Slew it to center of the eyepiece. 25mm and 10mm.
ENTER.
Calculating.
"Alignment complete"
Then goes to the menu to find objects.
Now I'm excited.
I go right for Jupiter.....and it slews the complete opposite direction. Jupiter is SSE and the scope moved to the West.
Hrm. OK.
I try the moon. It only moved a few degrees. Obviously the moon is certainly still in the East at 10pm at night.
So. Where did I go wrong?
The fact it went to the two alignment stars with that much accuracy has me very confused.
Another sorta unrelated question.
When the scope slews around there are times when the eyepiece and spotting scope are not in good locations, can I loosen the clamps and roll the scope in the clamps to get the eyepiece to a better location?
If you got this far! I thank you!
And thank you for any help! Hopefully it's a dumb and easy fix.
Ryan