Thanks for all the great information! I’ve printed it up.
I also have all the manuals and CD’s for the Scope. I’m going to be busy reading.
I also have all the manuals and CD’s for the Scope. I’m going to be busy reading.
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Cool, that will give you the proper procedure for aligning it to true north for viewing and collimation to make sure the mirror and lenses are lined up right so it gets a good view. Usually you manually align it to magnetic north with a compass and with a level on it too, then turn on the go to software and it asks you to point it toward two known objects, Polaris is usually #1. Once it “sees” where those two objects are, it can point you to any of 40,000 astronomical objects. I got the 40,000 number from their ads and reviews.
You might even be able to find and track the space station, but it moves pretty fast compared to celestial objects, I’m not sure that will work. I can track it with my manual scope if I happen to get it in view in the spotter scope, but only by pure chance and only with the spotter scope.
I don’t remember what software it comes with, a lot of people like Stellarium.
Starry Nights also comes with some scopes, I can’t remember what came with my Orion, I never used it, I used KStars instead, I already had it installed with Linux.
I like the Linux Kstars software a lot, it seems they worked up a windows version a while back too but I didn’t take time to look it up. I used Kstars a lot to print up star charts for the night, it’s not hard to look up what will be in the sky tonight, print a screenshot and take it out to the scope with me. I’m pretty sure any astronomical software will do the same. Depending on what version you get, many will connect to your scope so you can use a camera too. These days it should be a pretty simple USB conection.