This article (and the several sub-articles it points to) gives general advice on initial set up and alignment of a beginner-class telescope. It is just personal opinion and experience, and doesn’t replace your owner’s manual. However, in my experience, many owners’ manuals don’t provide the right level of detail or background explanation for beginners; the information in this article is the kind of thing I often end up discussing with a confused beginner who asks for help.
A poorly aligned finder scope makes it impossible to find anything except, with luck and frustration, the moon. Almost every time I hear a beginner complain “I can’t find anything except the moon”, it turns out they didn’t know they had to align their finder, or how to do so.
Poor mount setup causes inaccuracies in tracking objects — they drift out of the field of view even with your motorized scope; and it causes go-to systems to miss their targets, a major frustration for the beginner who was expecting the go-to to be magically accurate.
Setting up consumes time and, since the activity usually starts at dusk, it eats into observing time when it takes too long through lack of practice or inefficient technique. Worse, poor setup may force you to stop observing and correct.
Finally, you need to be proficient enough at setting up that you can re-do it quickly in the dark. Eventually you or a visitor will trip over a tripod leg or pull out a power cord, ruining your established alignment. To continue observing you will need to be able to re-align quickly, and in the dark, all while fending off mosquitoes and impatient visitors and their children.
In addition to the manual, read any other user guides you can find. Every telescope and mount model has a user group somewhere — often in Yahoo Groups, groups.io, discord, or FaceBook, — and you will find many users have written their own user guides, usually in an attempt to make the information beginners need clearer and more accessible. You're reading one now.
Finally, be patient. Setting up a scope and mount accurately is a complex process, and it will take time. It also improves and accelerates dramatically with practice, so give yourself time to develop the skills. For example, I remember the first time I set up my first complex equatorial go-to mount it took several hours and I still wasn’t getting good results. After reading more documentation and, most important, frequent practice, the same process now takes me only 10 to 15 minutes, with better results.
Aside from simply holding the optics steady, the main reason for the setup and alignment of your telescope and mount is to enable it to help you locate objects and track them across the sky. This is especially important if you have an equatorial mount, or any kind of mount using a go-to system. The setup steps will make much more sense if you have a basic understanding of how the sky moves, and you should before working through the setup procedures.
A beginner may be able to find simple objects with a misaligned mount, but you won’t be able to follow them for long, or find difficult objects. Here are articles on setting up your mount, by mount type:
I’ve never owned a Dob and, since this collection of articles is all first-hand experience, I have nothing to write. Should I ever own one, I’ll write up the procedures.
This is by no means a recommendation against Dobs. Quite the opposite — if you are a beginner you should start with a Dob. I didn't, and it was a mistake.
It’s just that my equipment preferences were set, and my budget spent, long ago, before Dobs were readily available, and my personal priorities for the various factors that determine the ideal scope tend to push me toward tripod-based mounts. And, frankly, I just didn't know any better.
Here is an article on the basics of go-to mounts and digital setting circles.
