I have been struggling recently to set up my Orion OMC-140 telescope on my HEQ-5 mount. I find that trying to use the polar scope correctly and then carrying out a 3 star setup isn't that easy and it is very time consuming. I had a session the other day where it looked like it was going to be clear and so I began the process in the afternoon of setting up the mount and the telescope. By the time it was dark I had finally carried out a successful 3 star setup but before I could really do anything the whole telescope (and in particular the front corrector of this Maksutov-Cassegrain) had frozen up! It was very disappointing.
So on the 3rd I thought to hell with it, I wouldn't bother with an elaborate setup. I have three slabs set in the ground where I can place the feet of the tripod mount and on these I had marked where I think they should be placed (this at least was a good outcome from the freezing night). So I just set the feet correctly, moved the telescope until it was pointing at Saturn and switched on the equatorial drive (you can do this in one of the hand-controller options). Bingo! It worked very well and I was able to hold Saturn in the eyepiece for over an hour without having to adjust anything.
I decided to draw what I saw through the scope:-
Saturn's rings, at the moment, are virtually edge on. There is a very good application in TheSkyLive which shows where Saturn's moons are and how the rings are displayed to us. I used this information to label the moons that I was able to see. Two other potentially visible moons Mimas and Enceladus were located close to the rings but I was unable to pick them out. I was very pleased to see four of the moons. There was also a hint of a colour change in Saturn which I have indicated by thin line. North is up and east is to the left. The equatorial diameter of Saturn on this day was about 18.9 arc seconds and its magnitude was about 0.75. Our moon was one day from full.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2025
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