Speaking of Guy, where is he? I haven't seen any of his posts for a while. -- Joe --- On Thu, 6/18/09, Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> wrote: From: Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] My new solar mount setup To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Thursday, June 18, 2009, 6:28 PM I finally had a chance to use the PST on my new GoTo mount.  I went with the Orion Teletrack AZ-G.  The PST fits perfectly and is well within the 9-lb. instrument limit for the mount. One seeming handicap is that the sun is not an alignment object in the database.  However, I got around this by noting where the sun is currently, in relation to background stars that are in the alignment catalog.  Today the sun was only a few degrees to the left of El Nath (Beta Tauri), so I aimed the scope as best as I could at the spot of sky where I felt Beta Tauri was located.  I hit "enter" and selected Polaris as my second alignment star.  To my relief, the scope slewed very, VERY close to where I thought Polaris should be, so I hit "enter" a second time.  With my ersatz initialization complete, it was time to give it the acid test. I slewed the scope back over to the sun and set the tracking rate on Solar. To my relief, the sun stayed well-centered in the field for the duration of my observing session, about 20-25 minutes.  My work-around is a success! I plan on playing with the mount in coming nights, weather permitting, with a small refractor, on some night-time objects, and see how many of the 42,900 objects in the database are actually within the grasp of a 50-80mm telescope ROTFL! Please, nobody tell Guy that I bought a GoTo mount.  It IS for solar observing, primarily, but still... ;o) _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com