Had the first ’star party’ at our house with the new scope.  A few friends came over and we got to check out a few sights.  Lots of ambient light and 1/2 moon so we did some obvious stuff like Orion, Saturn, Mars, Pleiades, etc.  I had trained the drives earlier and that made a big difference in terms of slewing — the scope moves to the target object pretty right on now.  I think I’ll need to retrain once again since when I did it, it was windy, but the slewing works pretty decently already.  To train the drives, I needed a reticle eyepiece but since I didn’t want to spend money on that, I used a piece of hair and taped it to the back of a 3.8mm eyepiece — worked just fine.

I ordered the springy thingy to help mount the scope onto the tripod.  I also ordered Starry Night Pro — while the Star Atlas:PRO had good telescope contol capability, I didn’t find the interface user-friendly enough for my tastes so I’m going to try Starry Night Pro.  Other software that I’ve heard is good is SkyMap.

Lastly, I had mentioned the Scope Buggy earlier as well as the JMI Wheely-bars.  I decided for now not to purchase either since carrying the scope wasn’t as bad as I anticipated.  We move the scope and the tripod separately and the weight is manageable.