At long last a beautiful cloud free night for me to finally find out that my lovely new telescope was the absolute worst purchase of my adult life.
Over two hours of set up time – and it would have been more except I’d left it partially put together last time. And after all that, I turned the mount on and after a minute of whirring noises and moving the telescope around in a gentle circle, it ended up by pointing at a bare patch of sky and saying “this is Mars!” I was meant to do minor adjustments with the controller to get Mars in the centre of my view and then press enter, but unfortunately Mars was two full hands breadths to the left and up a little bit. I tried turning it on and off, and moving it to a different area, all to no avail. So, so far after about ten hours of work I’ve seen exactly zero heavenly bodies with the telescope. That’s a fairly poor track record in anyone’s book. To add insult to injury, during one of it’s supposedly clever set up manouvres, the telescope slid out of the mount and dropped over a metre onto the patio bricks. Nothing broken that I can see, and the mirror still seems to be intact, but who knows what damage it’s done – although if I can’t get the mount to work I may never find out.
Rating: one star (for the impressive whirring around when the mount pretends to be working. ) Should have stuck with my trusty old Dobsonian.
