On Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 10:07:45 PM UTC-8, palsing wrote:
On Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 9:12:34 PM UTC-8, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 13:24:50 -0800 (PST), palsing pnals...gmail.com
wrote:

On Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 11:21:54 AM UTC-8, Davoud wrote:
palsing:
Well, yeah, a properly aligned go-to can put you within, say, the middle 1/3
of the field of view... but in this case, there are at least a dozen or more
stars there... so, which is it? THAT'S why you need a really detailed star
chart.

It is much like finding Pluto. It is easy to see, but hard to nail down. As
good as go-to can be, it still doesn't label objects for you!

A Bisque Paramount with a TPoint model will put Barnard's Star (or
Pluto) dead-center on the camera sensor. In the case of a star,
plate-solving the FITS and bringing it into Aladin
https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr will verify that.

Well, for $14,000 it had better!

Any number of $1500 mounts will do the same these days.

Well, no such mounts for my 25" Obsession dob :). I feel pretty good when my push-to gets the object in the field of view! A wooden dob this size is pretty rickety when compared to a modern imaging refractor or reflector, so it is no surprise that pointing accuracy is often a little sketchy. Tpoint modeling helps, but perfection, as Davoud has described it, is a fantasy for me.

Nevertheless, this past week I spent 4 nights observing in the local Anza-Borrego desert, and everything was working really well, with objects being consistently somewhere in the field of view anywhere in the sky using an 8mm Meade 80° widefield. It is a *lot* more fun when this happens :) Of course, it got down to 21° F in the wee hours, so proper attire was required... but that is just the cost of doing business.

\Paul A

I have Vixen GP D (no X) mount, super accurate. GP D means, made for the Japanese market.
According to some reviews , the internal components are not machined, but insanely, precision ground! It can even dial in individual craters on the Moon any time with the SS2K goto.
Never tried it though?
Once, observed Jupiter in the early evening at 150x? power, poler scope was aligned accurate on Polaris, went inside the house and fall in sleep.
I woke up at 3 am , 5-6 hrs later, came back to the scope , Jupiter was still up, close to the horizon. Looked in the eye piece, behold, it was still centered in the middle of the eyepiece.