The sun is right where it should be in the sky!

Ok, NOW I believe ya.
But how about the Moon?
It doesn't fit the pattern, only the reproaching past principal.
Just sayin

What do you want to see and do with the scope? How comfortable are you at navigating the sky?

That question is a bit tricky, naturally I would like to see and do it all, but finances are tight. As far as navigating the sky, never have, but I am perfectly comfortable with it...lol...but yes, I think with my friend the internet I can learn enough for my purposes.

Let me put it this way, is it worth buying a telescope in the $200-300 range, or would it be best to wait until one could afford a bigger scope? Thanks again

That price range is a bit tricky when your sights are set on something that you won't want to supplant with something else in the near future. Honestly your best option at that point would be a good used scope or make your own ATM scope. This is the only one I could comfortably recommend given what you're hoping to achieve at that range:
[link to www.optcorp.com]
You'll have to learn how to star hop, which is a very good thing to learn, but with a dobsonian like that and no tracking I'd be more comfortable recommending at least the 8" version, which is about $50 more.

Thanks for the information, I did think about checking out the used market, but being a novice i have no idea what to look for, or what to look out for... -And the limited experience I have had with things like craigslist lead me to believe the world is full of assclowns just trying to rip you off...

I have that page bookmarked(as well as the 8" on that site) and will be looking into it. Thanks again

This year has produced more reports of the sun being in the "wrong place" in the sky than I can remember from previous years, so I wanted to develop a simple technique for accurately and objectively measuring the sun's position in the sky to a much greater resolution than is possible with the human eye, without even having to rely on my telescope's built-in permanently-encoded computer. To that end, this afternoon I setup my telescope to view the sun and measure its position with astrometric precision without even using GOTO technology.

Of course, you can't see background stars with the sun in the same field of view, so how do you perform astrometry of the sun itself? Simple, let the earth's rotation do the work. I simply pointed the telescope at the setting sun (with a safe full-aperture solar filter attached, of course) and started recording video. Moments later, right as a tree top started encroaching on the view, I disengaged the tracking system altogether and noted the time, so at this point the telescope was motionless and the sun started moving out of the field of view as the earth rotated.

Then it was just a matter of waiting. Waiting 2 hours 37 minutes, as a matter of fact. I had disengaged the tracking at 6:41:45 PM eastern time, and this was the corresponding frame of the video, showing the limb of the sun that would later be used to determine its exact position:
[link to i319.photobucket.com]
After the sun set enough that it was safe, I removed the solar filter and waited. At 9:19:21 PM eastern time, a series of fairly bright stars streaked into the field of view, producing this image:
[link to i319.photobucket.com]
Directly merging the two images with 50% opacity allows me to determine with exact precision whether or not the sun was where it should have been in the sky. Overlaying the merged image onto Stellarium set to the exact same points in time at my location shows definitively that the sun was exactly where it should have been, at RA: 11h 15m 24s DEC: +4d 47' 26".
[link to i319.photobucket.com]
The full 2+ hour video from sunset to the above star streak image will be uploaded in a little while, as soon as the video file is done compressing to a reasonable size from the 2+ Gigabyte original file.

Your thread and post is really fucking stupid.. Glad you know how to edit pictures and make animated GIFs, but this is all very stupid.

In fact it is so stupid that i'll bet you 100 dollars that the answer to 2+2 is the same as it was just yesterday..

The SUN.. Is exactly where it should be, like everything else, but is not exactly in it's normally relative spot.

Just face the facts, many of us are crazy, or we were zapped a with memory hit, or there was a timeline shift, or the earth titled or something else happened to another/other celestial bodies. One of those is correct, but i will not argue with you that something is or isn't where it "should be".

Why the hate? Calm down boy, you are going to have a stroke.

He has brain envy.