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