My brother sent me this email on the subject a couple years ago after he sent me his old telescope for my b-day. Still relevant. Bottom paragraph is relevent to your post.
Quote: "Alright dude, here's the deal, you wanna keep an eyepiece at about 9mm.
Go to www.optcorp.com and look for one there. They have 3 I would
recommend. You can go with the OptCorp brand, the Celestron brand or
the Meade. I personally would spend the money on the Meade, but the
other two will work just fine. If you go with Celestron, you will save
quite a few dollars and you'll have 2 matching pieces.
As for the solar filter, I would be very careful what you buy. You have
to understand you will be looking at the sun, so make sure you read
ratings and customer reviews at www.skytonight.com when it comes to
filters. Expensive is not necessarily better when it comes to solar
filters. If you wanna look at the sun, I suggest you save the money and
get a scope from Coronado. That will be your best bet. The solar
filters are good to use, but you have to buy from a reputable source.
If you have a hole or a bad coating, you can seriously damage yo [poop].
You smell me?
As for the computer, here's the deal. You have to make sure you are
completely level. Period. You also have to make sure you have the
telescope pointed north. The instruction manual will tell you how to
align the scope more specifically than I can from memory. When you
aling the scope on the 3 stars, use that book I gave you to identify a
constellation, find a common star. Align your first star to that one.
Then, try to go to the oposite side of the sky, find another common
constellation, and find a common star in that one. Align the second
time to this one. For the third one, find a place in the sky kinda
opposite where you aligned the 1st and 2nd times and go thru the same
setup again. What you wanna do is triangulate the scope under those 3
different constellations. That will make the scope pretty accurate. Don't depend on the computer to get you dead on. I was never
really able to get it to do that. Use your books and sky charts to find
the stuff. The computer is great for locking onto something and
followinig it, it is also great to finely adjust your scope to find
stuff that kind of obscure. Use the computer to get you within like an
arcminute from stuff. A suggestion from me would be to use Polaris in
Ursa Minor, Antares in Scorpio and Arcturus in Bootes to align the
scope. But remember, you have to be on level ground and you have to
zero your scope North. Also, use Google earth to find your Lat/Lon at
your observation site. That should be good enough for the computer to
be really accurate with the time and location. Unless you are moving
hours away to go look at stars, your apt should be good for the Lat/Lon.
Also, don't set your clock ahead 3 minutes. That's just dumb. The
scientists/engineers at Meade are a little better than making a machine
which needs to be set ahead 3 minutes....
I'm glad you like the scope. Just remember, it will be great to get
started with, enjoy it, and have fun with it, but remember to save some
cash, coz you will definitely wanna get something bigger. If I was you,
I would look at finding maybe a used Schmidt-Cass (SCT) in like a 8" or
bigger that's used. You'll spend mad money, but the views are amazing.
Seriously, you need to come to AZ and look thru my stuff. Its crazy!
"
