Life is a continuous learning process, which especially applies when taking up a new hobby.

Every time I take out my telescope I learn something new. Yes, there are all the celestial objects I continuously discover and learn about however, using and understanding my telescope and it's GoTo mount is also a non-stop process.

After three months I am now familiar and well versed with the physical process of setting up the tripod, levelling using a spirit level and roughly aligning to north using a compass. Then comes the operation of the GoTo mount.

"Don't fiddle with things you don't understand..."

When I first started using the computerised mount I worked on the principle of 'don't fiddle with the settings'. This worked great in some respects however, after repeatedly struggling with initial alignment and finding that every alignment star was not even in the finder-scope I began to explore.

And that's where I discovered that the "daylight saving" displayed in the setup was not a menu header for one to go into and set this option but rather it was a toggle on/off option. So from February to April I had been using the mount with the clock at BST, one hour out !

"Human error..."

Cloudy skies and ill-health put paid to astro sessions for several weeks, so with a rare gap in the clouds I eagerly took my scope into the back garden for a post-collimation session.

Again I was plagued by alignment issues, every star was not visible in the finder. I double checked that Polaris was visible through the polar-align hole in the mount, rebooted mount, tried again, same result. Then I double checked lat and long settings, time-zone, daylight saving, date ....... and that was when I discovered that May is the 5th month of the year, not the 4th !

"Be aware of changes..."

So, now with the correct month in the settings I hoped for a better alignment process but no, it was doing really weird things, including pointing well below the horizon!

Which is when I spotted that the counterbalance weight was hitting the mount casing, a totally new situation for me, introduced by adding a newly purchased 2nd counterweight. So rather than having one weight at the very bottom end of the shaft, I had two at the very top.

"Still worth going out..."

By the time I had resolved both the date and weight issues it was late and I was tired, so after settling for a quick 2-star alignment, I enjoyed a short observing session. The key purpose of the session was to see if the collimation had made any difference and wow, it had certainly paid off, every object was now in focus and razor sharp.