After about 5 attempts on clear nights from the past 3 weeks, last night I finally got a SkyAlign setup on my new Nexstar 8SE.  I don't know if I should chalk it up to my noobness at scopes, or star patterns, but I am here to offer at least my advice on getting a two star alignment set up on the the NexStar system.  

1.) First off the last sentence said it all, don't do the three star alignment, go for the two star.

2.) Find your lat/long of your EXACT position.  Go down to the second.  I used this site:  Satsig.net

3.) Go to Google Maps and see if you can find your house (or where ever you are viewing from) and look for some kind of physical demarcations that you can use for verification.  Our house happens to run almost perfectly North to South so that allowed me to orient myself within Stellarium (next step) very easily.  I knew spatially what stars I would be able to see and which I wouldn’t (the house, trees block etc).

3.) Download Stellarium.  This is a gift of an app.  Extremely well developed, and will help you visualize your time space exactly for the moment you want to start the SkyAlign process.  Verify your location (lat/long you just found), time of day, etc and get a current view of your exact time.

4.) Use the moon as your jumping off point.  I found that (at least last night) I jumped from the moon to Spica pretty easily.  I also did this at the very end of twilight where magnitude ~1 ish starts were much more visible instead of at pitch black night when there were hundreds of stars my scope would pick up for me to mess up with.

5.) Once I had Spica lined up and aligned.  I brought up this app: Best Pair II .  Another great app that is free and is an extremely handy app.  Go to the “Site Parameters” Tab and pop in your lat/long you just found.  Make sure the time and UTC offset is right, and then hit Compute Visibility and then Compute Best Pair.    Then click on the “Best Pair” tab.  Since I had already found Spica I checked both the first and second star in the lists till I came across the opt pair (lowest Error)  and found the stars that were the match for the best pair.  Tonight that happens to be Vega, Deneb and Albireo. 

6.) Then go back to Stellarium and pull up those three stars.  Hit F3 to search and just enter their names.   Best Pair uses pretty bright stars so Stellarium should never have trouble finding any of the.  Out of those three (which were pretty much the same last night) Deneb had not crested over my house by the time of my alignment so it was out of the question.  However Vega is at a higher point in the sky and is a bit brighter so I was able to go from my roof up almost vertically and find it pretty well.  I locked it in, pulled back my focus till I saw the ‘donut’ and hit align. 

7.) Held my breath.

8.) Got the alignment success notification.   Pulled my focus back till Vega looked like a normal star:

9.) Punched in ‘Moon’ just to verify everything was working correctly with alignment.  Hit the button and off the scope went and landed right on the zenith of the moon.   Good times.  Hit up Saturn right after.

Couple of things I learned over the past few nights also (just as notes):

a.) Polaris (current North Star) is not the brightest star in the north sky.  Sirius and many other stars are brighter.  Don’t just grab the brightest star in that general area and use it to align your scope.   I think 70% of my alignment mistakes were from this.  I thought I knew it, but I didn’t.

b.) Always jump from the moon to your first star.  It is a huge frickin’ target and easy to bounce off of.

c.) My reddot finder scope that came with my 8se sucks balls.  I can’t target anything with it and the red dot pretty much doesn’t exist even with a new battery.  Until I have enough extra cash to afford one of these bad boys, I will just continue getting my general heading with Stellarium and landmarks around me once I eyespot the star.  Once aligned though it rocks.   Just punch in the star and listen for the hum of the motor to find it for you.

d.) Slewing is different once you are “aligned”  the slew seems to go much much slower (which is good).  I did find myself over compensating with it though because it wasn’t moving as fast as my ‘non aligned’ slew speed.  Just keep it in mind.

e.) Stellarium has a really cool red mode you can use for not killing your night vision, once your night vision mojo is flowing.  

f.) Wear Garlic.  The last thing you want to do is hunker your eye down to your scope and see vampire teeth, then stick your head up and have the vampire right on top of you.   That is what they look for, star geeks without garlic.

It certainly may just my noobness at this, but I am extremely glad I got all this figured out.  One of the things I have read over and over at Cloudy nights is that the biggest frustration with SkyAlign and the Meads versions (don’t know what it is called) of some of the larger SCT scopes that autoalign is that people get so frustrated that they give up on not only the scope but also Astrogazing in general.  I really didn’t think anything of this until the forth night I lugged everything out to the backyard and couldn’t get anything to line up.   That is when I hit up a bunch of places online and compiled all those notes here.   I hope this helps anyone who is starting to get frustrated.  

I had planned on not breaking out my CCD camera until I really got a few months into the viewing and had a few Messier objects under my belt.  I wanted to get comfortable with the scope first and foremost (almost anywhere you read about Astrophotography they say the same thing).    Well anyways after a few beers and already having my laptop out with me next to scope I went ahead and took a few pics last night.  I am still at the very very beginning stages of learning the CCD controls, Stacking, etc for the images, but I thought these were pretty decent for my first night out.  Consider them my first attempts at astrophotography:

Astronomy, Headline astrophotography, nexstar 8se, moon