gcorniani_br wrote: ↑Thu Oct 07, 2021 1:16 am
Hello everybody abs thank you for this nice forum. I am starting on astronomy and I have a Celestron Nextstar 6SLT telescope (6” -150mm Schmidt Cassegrain optical tube).
I already was able to take nice pictures from the moon and Jupiter. But... So I need to keeping refinding it every few seconds…right?
I went to the Celestron website to read the specifications.
https://www.celestron.com/products/nexstar-6slt
As Graeme1858 and KathyNS noted, your motorized, computerized mount will track and hold position once it is properly aligned.
I have a different Celestron product but similar in many ways. Allow me to suggest that you do
more than two stars, four if you can.
(Just for one thing, smart as the software is, the fact remains that it takes three points to plot a conic section curve like a circle or an ellipse. So, give your telescope all the data it needs.)
Also the stars you select should be far from the North Pole (Polaris) and close or the the Ecliptic or the Equator. The Ecliptic is the path of the Zodiac. It is not easy with the Celestron software, but you have to know the stars by their Arabic names and where to find them. That means spending time with star charts planning your session outdoors.
I know that we all want this to be like channel surfing the television, but it is more like flying an airplane, and pilots spend as much time or more
planning the flight as they do flying.
Also, the advice here to get used to your telescope before attemting photography is very sound. You have to walk before you can run. I have been doing this for a number of years and with my new computerized Celestron mount, I devoted daylight time indoors before four nights outdoors just learning the menu.
Final piece of advice here and now:
NEVER give the telescope a command unless you have control of the OFF switch. Your SLT computer does not know which telescope it is carrying. So, it can drive the telescope into the mount if you are not careful. Also, some moves are impossible for the computer though easy for a person and you can give it a command that will make it turn upside down, telescope and all. So, guard that switch. (Hard lesson I should have known from working with robots.)