Aiming a CCD camera can be difficult, since there is no facility to ”look through” the camera. The Presets can be very useful for aiming. Set up a preset to take a very short duration, binned image. Although the focus frame will be a very short exposure, the use of binning will boost the signal-to-noise ratio and make it possible to see faint objects. You can switch back and forth quickly between focus, find and autosave sequence presets.
If you have a GOTO telescope, several helpful features are available.
You can use PinPoint Astrometry as a digital finderscope. If you slew to an object but it does not appear on the chip, perform a PinPoint reduction using the Spiral Search option. Once PinPoint has found the solution, switch to the Observatory Control window Telescope tab and press Sync. You will be asked if you want to sync to the PinPoint solution. Click OK to align the telescope’s controller to the accurate PinPoint measurement, and then click the GOTO button again. Also you can use PinPoint to overlay the image in the planetarium display of the Observatory Control window.
The PinPoint feature can also be used to overlay images on the planetarium Zoom display. This is very useful for identifying specific targets.
If your object appears on-chip but not centered, you can use the Auto Center feature of the Observatory Control. Once Auto Center is calibrated (Center tab), you can right-click the object on the image and select Point telescope here. The telescope will be slewed to move the point you clicked on to the center of the image. (If there is significant backlash in the mount, you may need to do this a second time.) This technique greatly speeds up image composition.
You should also consider using MaxPoint, which is available at extra cost from http://www.cyanogen.com. MaxPoint models the errors in a telescope mount and corrects for them. Even on inexpensive GOTO telescopes, you can easily achieve pointing accuracies of 1-2 arc-minutes, which is sufficient to put objects near the center of your CCD sensor over the entire sky.