Dumbell and a coathanger

It was a perfectly clear night in south Texas and I finally decided to put the ETX-70 through its paces. I spent yesterday wandering through the Autostar's menu tree and 'training the drives'. Tonight I set up the ETX on my trusty shopmate, aimed it at the fourth palm tree up the street (north), leveled it with my little 10" level, and did a two star alignment. First off was Vega, high in the sky. It skewed to the right spot but no Vega so I hunted around for a bright star and found it. Then I hit enter and off to number 2: Altair in Aquilla. Bingo, not dead center but at least in the FOV. I synced on Altair and then went hunting. First off was Jupiter since Venus had since slipped out of sight behind a palm tree. It was also out of the FOV but wasn't far off. For some reason or other, I could barely make out one of the moons tonight. I decided later that the farther the ETX has to slew, the greater likelyhood that the object will be out of the field. A compass and better leveling is probably in order but this first setup was certainly easy enough and quite acceptable. It was FAR easier to find things in my light poluted sky than with my 8" dob. At least the ETX gets me into the general vicinity. I forgot the magic button to push to activate the spiral search so will save that for another day. After slewing to several visible stars, I decided to push things and go for Messier objects. M56 and M71 proved to be too dim to find but M27, the dumbell, was quite visible as a fuzzy patch. I sketched a field of stars including some mag 8 ones that matched CdC nicely. Next I noticed that the coathanger was about halfway between Alpha Vul and Alpha Sagita so I slewed to Alpha Vul first, then watched as the ETX slewed to Alpha Sag and watched the coathanger slide by. Then I just manually navigated over to take a closer look. The sidereal tracking isn't perfect but I was able to observe long enough to sketch without having to constantly nudge the scope back into position. It even held position long enough to come inside to check CdC periodically. Very nice.
I'm not sure how people do astrophotography with this thing though. When viewing near zenith, the camera port is so close to the mount that one would need to use a very tiny camera. It should be ok for taking pictures along the ecliptic though.
Bottom line is that it'll take a few more sessions to get more familiar with this new toy but it'll be fun to tinker with. The ETX-70 certainly has its limitations but the portability and ease of use make up for most of them.