since last post. All down to a failure of a screw on a microswitch on Obby’s sliding roof. Alastair M saw it recently and suggested super gluing it on. A good tip

its September, a good month for Hercules. Been out twice, calibrated from first principles and used the tripod and a battery. Worked really well.

Went through this process;

set up tripod

putmount on, then set to Polaris,NCP, using polariscope and green laser. Ground very wet when crouching down to view, not pleasant. Polar finder app useful, on phone and tablet. Note to self, use scope to check close to Polaris, and adjust with alt-az .

made sure telescope properly parked, also cleared pAE data. Used a spirit level and show position data on handset.

put on OST, balanced it, then got going, used two star calibration, Deneb and Polaris.

The trees are very tall, no good view of vega, but will try for albireo and epsilon lyrae tonight if WP. Usually get a haar 9pm, rolls down the hill into the garden. Everything then gets soaked, laser really shows the sparkles.

M13 proving elusive, I end up looking at a grey smudge which I am sure is the adjacent Galaxy.i need to down power, perhaps use the big 31mm hand-grenade.

Feeling better about it all again, planning on a dark sky trip to Galloway, after weekend at loch trool.

The next trick will be the photography side and hitching the IIID onto the scope. M13 would look beautiful.