I’ve been observing this ‘for one night only’ event for some time. Yesterday evening I tried the 5-inch Taylor-Mak GoTo. The red dot finder worked OK until it was mounted on the ‘scope, then it refused to work. Aligning on Venus took quite some time – my kingdom for a standard finderscope. I eventually got the planet in the 25mm eyepiece which presented nice views of its crescent.
I slewed across to Jupiter; its pointing was many degrees out (perhaps my numpty knowledge of using the hand controller). After several minutes I located Jupiter and its four Galilean moons. Impressive sight. On pressing a button to align, the ‘scope shot off again, umpteen degrees away. More minutes spent recovering the planet…then the wrong key pressed again… 🙁
By this time I had a headache and wet knees from kneeling on the lawn to find Jupiter and Mars. I gave up with modern technology, brought a coffee table outside, plonked my Edmund Astroscan on it and had no problems finding all three bright planets. I had no patience or energy left to star hop to Uranus… 🙂
Alex.