If you're going to be doing a lot of imaging with your telescope, another tip is that you should update all the star catalogs in Stellarium. This third party application acts as a server and extends the number of devices that can be controlled by Stellarium. Although it is possible to directly control your telescope with Stellarium, I highly recommended also installing StellariumScope. This guide will assume that you have a computerized GOTO mount that is compatible, have already downloaded and installed Stellarium, and that you have the appropriate ASCOM drivers that make all this different software compatible. There is also plenty of documentation on this topic, but sometimes it can be confusing and I personally find it helpful to be able to follow a worked example. There is lots of documentation on the internet about the basic use of Stellarium (start with their wiki), so this post will focus primarily on the aspect of telescope control. However, the "All-Sky" planetarium view in Maxim DL is pretty paltry so that's why I opt to couple it with Stellarium for a more visually intuitive interface. Maxim DL is the swiss army knife of telescope imaging software because it allows for control of the telescope, camera, dome, filters, focuser, etc. (I have switched to using the open source INDI Library for controlling my remote observatory). I have used Stellarium in conjunction with Maxim DL to control my photometry sessions with TECMO. This is a free open source planetarium for your computer that is highly customizable.
Although there are many planetarium software choices available that range from super fancy (and expensive!) to bare bones, my favorite is Stellarium. Planetarium software is particularly cool because it enables you to simply click objects to direct your telescope to point at them. One of the most awesome features of modern amateur telescopes is that they can connect with a computer to allow control by a wide assortment of software.
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