Well I finally picked up the scope yesterday afternoon and immediately
returned home to set it up. It came in 2 boxes, one for the tripod, one
for the scope, mount, accessories and LPI. The mount just required a
C-clip to be fitted to the central bolt assembly to fix the leg brace in
place. The scope and mount were all assembled - just needed to attach
the finder scope, eyepiece holder, star diagonal, then add batteries and
attach to the mount and I was done.

As exepected, the tripod and mount were solid and well engineered, quite
a contrast to my eBay scope. The finder scope was a revelation after the
plastic one on my last scope, and was quickly aligned with the main
scope. Next I plugged in the Autostar and fiddled around for a few hours
waiting for it to get dark.

I was planning Jupiter for first light, as I have struggled with it in
the past, and wanted a comparison. It was just as well, because Jupiter
was the first nighttime object to appear. Still unable to align the
scope as there were no stars yet, I manually moved the scope to Jupiter.
The finder scope was great, and placed well so I found it exceptionally
easy to get the target in the main scope - this was another revalation,
as my old scope was very difficult to point at anything.

First light of Jupiter was amazing ! I used the Meade supplied 26mm
Plossl, giving a mag of 77x. I straight away saw a wealth of detail that
hadn't before been apparent - beautful Salmon rings, at least 4 of
them. The whole field was sharp and easy to focus, the moons were bright
little points arrayed around the planet. I swapped the Meade for an 11mm
TeleVue plossl, giving 182x and saw more detail. I wasn't lingering as I
wanted to try everything out. Higher magnification started to lose
detail, I don't think the conditions were better than average.

It still wasn't fully dark, and I was manually tracking Jupiter, so I
waited a while until the stars appeared.

Next I took a sighting on Arcturus and verified that the collimation was
ok. Other users (hello Chris !) reported that their collimation was off
upon delivery, but mine seemed spot on.

Next I decided to align the scope. My back garden faces East, and has
very restricted views in any other direction. I aligned the mount North
using Polaris, then the Autostar asked me to center Arcturus first - no
problem. It then picked a star to the west and duly pointed straight
towards the house - not very helpful, but it wasn't to know. I got to
the bottom of its list of alignment stars without finding another one I
could see. Next I tried the manual 2 star alignment which lets you pick
the alignment stars. Much better - I picked Arcturus and Duhbe and was
quickly aligned. I found that the alignment stars usually didn't make it
into the scope's field, but were easy to pick out in the finder scope
and center. I guess this means that my initial North sighting was off.

Note to self: need to pick up an eyepiece with crosshairs for alignment.

Once properly aligned, the GOTO function could be tested. Once again, I
picked on Jupiter, and was pleased to see that it duly arrived in the
scope's field with the 26mm eyepiece. Not centered, I think I need to
work on accuracy of alignment, either using that crosshair eyepiece, or
a higher power eyepiece to get it exact. The scope was noisy when
slewing at max speed, but very quiet, silent in fact when guiding. In
operation, the scope quickly slews to the region of the target, then
steps down to a much slower movement for greater accuracy. On average it
would take 30 - 45 seconds to pinpoint a target, and the handset beeps
to let you know it is there.

This was the first time I had ever used a guided scope, and it was a
revalation to be able to look at Jupiter without it drifting out of
view. Jupiter deserved a whole night, but I had other fish to fry - my
old Nemesis M3.

I selected M3 from the list of Messiers and the scope slewed into place.
I could straight away see a misty patch, but it wasn't very clear. I
don't think conditions were good, and I was having trouble seeing more
than 3rd magnitude stars naked eye anyway. I tried various eyepieces and
settled on the 26mm with a 2x barlow, and eventually I managed to get a
really nice view of the cluster. It came and went, but I can definately
tick that one off now :-)

I had a quick look for M53 (marginal), M101 (no luck) & M51 (maybe), but
by this time I had to go out on an errand and my star gazing was over
for the night.

All in all, a very succesful first outing - its clear that I need to
move to somewhere with better visibility and less light pollution (don't
we all), but until I can manage that, the LX90 will show me more and
more as I become more experienced - I'm looking forward to it !

I'll spend a while getting used to the scope optically before I try out
the LPI I think, I'll keep you all posted.

Clear Skys,

Andrew