Impatience and Disappointment

My son persuaded me not to wait until he was away to set the telescope up and that he was ideally qualified to help at 7am this morning when he woke me up. With some trepidation I set about unpacking everything and mustered the courage to look at the instruction booklet.

I needn't have worried - the instruction booklet that came with my Sky-Watcher Explorer 130pm was very straight forward to follow and gave simple steps that I could easily understand. In less than an hour me and my 6 year old son had put it all together. He is extremely happy as this means he has a big box to play in! Although when it's in the box it all seems too heavy to be portable, once it is put together it doesn't seem so hard to move around. Balancing the scope was relatively simple although i really need to get my head around the equatorial mount it comes with.

I understand the concept of the sky appearing to rotate around the north pole (and therefore pretty much Polaris). How that translates into the movement adjustments I can make on my mount is causing me to scratch my head a bit. Hopefully it will become clearer once I've pointed it at something and tried to track it for a while. Unfortunately we had torrential rain in the hour before sunset this evening and thick clouds are blowing over so I have been unable to try it out. It is supposed to be clearer tomorrow night so I'll try again then.

What I have noticed while I was looking at some of the documentation that came with my scope is that the tube seems longer than the picture on the advert when I bought it. It seems like I have been sent the Sky-Watcher Explorer 130EM and not the 130PM. The difference being the EM has a focal length of 900mm and the PM is 650mm with better optics and £20 dearer. On the positive side the shop I bought it from supplied upgraded eyepieces. I wonder if they knew it was wrong and have tried to somewhat make up for it? I'll give ScopesnSkies a call on Tuesday because I ordered the 130PM on the back of all the reviews I read online and not to get what I asked for is disappointing. Now the scope is all set up (and most of the packaging recycled already) I might as well give it a go tomorrow and see what it's like.