Trying to view Jupiter with Nexstar 8SE

Hi Everyone,

I am new to astronomy.. I picked up a nice used Celestron Nexstar 8SE off a nice guy here on the classifieds. I confirmed the alignment by having the telescope go to a handful of stars that I know of for sure, and I got it to align close to exactly spot on. I aligned up my telerad perfectly with the scope, and I got the alignment so close that every time I would go to a star It would be barely out of view, I would just need to hit the Left button once or twice.. So I believe my alignment is working great.

I went to view jupiter last night, around 10:30PM I started looking for it because SkySafari 4 showed it being high enough up in the south east sky. I tried for an hour.. But I could not see jupiter! .. I re- ran the alignment procedure 3 times to make sure.. Every time the scope went to where jupiter should have been, but no jupiter! I double checked each time by holding my phone up against my telrad and using Skysafari and Starchart, and it always was spot on or very close...

I used a 32mm wide eyepiece, so that is about 65x magnification.. Does anyone have any ideas of why I could not see it, or any tips to help? I'd love to view jupiter!

One thing to note, I Do have a significant amount of light pollution due to living about 2 miles outside of a decent sized city.. But the scope easily showed me tons of different stars with quite a bit of brightness...

Thanks!!

Ive never used a nexstar, but could it possibly be that daylight savings time is set wrong that would make Jupiter one hour off in the system?

It sure sounds like the 8SE is not computing the position of the Planets for today's date and time. But you should still be able to locate Jupiter by manually slewing to it using the 8SE hand paddle.

Jupiter should be the brightest object found in the eastern half of the sky, just below Leo, due east (1h 20m, or 20°) of the bright star Regulus. Using your Telrad and the manual slewing feature of the 8SE, simply center Jupiter in the Telrad bullseye. Jupiter and three or four Galilean moons should be easily located in the 8SE using the 32mm eyepiece. Center Jupiter and switch to a higher power eyepiece (something around 10mm) for a closer look at the features in the Jovian belts.