The Someday Scope

I'm fairly happy with Neptune, the Meade LX10 I've got now. It's a lot of things I knew wanted (pretty, a Schmidt-Cassegrain, got digital setting circles), but it's also got a lot of things I didn't know I wanted (clock drive...okay, just clock drive). But there are some things I'm less happy with.

For one, it's been cloudy a LOT since I got it. What the hell, Meade?

But seriously, folks...I'm finding it interesting how difficult it is to be sure what I'm looking at. And by "interesting" I mean "damn frustrating." When I read entries on, say, Rod Mollise's blog that say things like "...and when I tested alignment, BAM! There was M13, right in the centre!", I'm wondering why I don't see that. (NB: the parts of his blog that say this inevitably come after a long and involved tale of how he had to reboot the hand controller, or shoo away magnet bats that screwed up the internal compass, or something.))

I can think of a few possible causes:

1. Older controller/technology. I'm sure things have improved a lot.
2. Half the times I've tried testing this, I've been on my front porch. NO dark adaptation to speak of. I've had better luck with brighter open clusters, but if I'm trying some 10th magnitude spiral? Sure, I'll have problems.
3. Poor alignment (cf: older technology). Can't see Polaris from my porch...
4. Getting used to the upside-down, mirror-reversed, black-on-white (for all I know) view in an SC. It's hard to map that to what I see in my atlases.
5. Not having a large-enough scale atlas. Typical FOV is, what, one degree? On my atlases, that's about the size of my fingernail. The one time I went out on the porch with my laptop was interesting...being able to really zoom in helped me catch a faint galaxy, and maybe that's what's needed.

Dunno...I've gotta bite the bullet and post on Cloudy Nights. This just calls out for help from people who know what they're doing.