Alignment oddities...

My 6SE had something of a fit over the weekend. I have no idea what I did wrong or what I did to resolve it but for the first part of the evening, it was behaving very oddly.

I normally use Polaris and Altair to perform an alignment. These combinations are pretty for me to identify with one to the north, I'll leave you to guess which, and one pretty much to the south and both at different altitudes. At the start of the evening, my CN16 GPS add-on was behaving erratically and seemed unable to link properly. So I overrode it, set the time manually and got started. Polaris went OK but when I went to Altair in the list of named stars, it wasn't there. So I retried on Dubhe and got aligned, though as these two stars are pretty close together it wasn't too good an alignment.

Then I noticed that some other objects weren't listed - the Ring Nebula and the Moon for two - so something odd seemed to be going on. So I powered off the scope, reset it to level pointing north, put the GPS on the top and started again. This time it got the GPS link first time, the alignment stars included Altair and when aligned, the Ring Nebula was there in the list of named objects and the moon in the Solar System objects.

A very peculiar event.

The rest of the evening went very well. I saw all my old favourites and even Uranus made a short appearance as a very small disk, slightly offset in the FOV but still definitely visible. A quick look at the moon showed a nice focused image with very visible craters - I just couldn't fit it all in the FOV. Then I had my next odd event, the moon lost focus. So I switched to Albireo and checked, focus was fine. The looked at the front of the scope and the Schmidt plate, which was covered in a fine coating of water. Sometime while I was looking at the moon we hit the right temperature for dew to form and with no heating on my Schmidt plate, that was it for the evening.

So a couple of interesting views, some problems - one with a clear cause and the other hard to explain - and more progress in observation. Now all I need to do is get hold of a small 12v hair dryer to keep my objective dry :)