StarDuke82

Just a Aluminum case from the hardware store but it suits its purpose and holds everything I have at the moment. Baader Zoom and Barlow and Orion Illuminated Centering eyepiece, and my 40mm wide field Plossl are my most used.

Well you are basically by focusing both of your eyes on single point of light, since your eyes are so good at picking up light in the dark with an eyepiece with a wide enough exit pupil (I find it works best when I try it with my Zoom Eyepiece) you will see just the light of what you are observing. I may just be able to do it because my peripheral vision goes bad at night and it’s like I am in a tunnel so that could help with this. 🤣 I will add that I am not very far away from the eyepiece when I do this say if the eye relief is 20 mm then I am just a bit past that just enough that I can see the eyepiece with both eyes but still be within the exit pupil

I can just barely see Polaris from my backyard it’s so faint if a car goes by or my neighbors turn on their lights I can’t see it anymore. I can only see the brightest stars from my backyard maybe 50 on a good clear winter’s night and too few in the summer. Those days are probably numbered they are building a grocery store less than 3 miles away from home and the parking lot full of lights will surely dim my already dwindling stargazing. 😢

I am in the same thinking that they are two bright and irregular to be stars, I used my 40mm Plossl eyepiece and I know sometimes they can have bubbles in the glue that bonds the different lenses together however I have never noticed this before and the bubbles or spots aren’t in my defocused image I took to check my collimation so I would think they would still show up there with a wider dispersion of

I was collimating my scope the other night and decided to take a photo of Alpha Umi aka Polaris as I was collimating my and not paying that much attention to the stars around it I can’t remember if they were stars located where these spots are or if my particular eyepiece might have bubbles, I have looked up images online and the star field around Polaris sort of looks like there should be stars located where these points of light are but I am not entirely sure.

I forgot to note that before I collimated my scope that when I looked at stars through my telescope they looked like asterisks * now that my scope is collimated they are nice round points of light.

Yes I made sure to tighten everything down when I was finished to make sure I didn’t lose collimation

Yes my corrector plate already has a very small scratch on that was there when it arrived from the manufacturer they said it wouldn’t affect the viewing due to where it was located and how small it is but I didn’t want to risk scratching it up further with a screwdriver so that’s why I ordered the knobs, I think it would have been a bit more nerve racking on me with a screwdriver to 😂

Question where are you using it if you’re out in the field where no one is around then the wifi should work fine, buy if you’re at home even if you but a wifi dongle it may not work well. The wifi in these scopes doesn’t work very well in areas where there is a lot of wifi traffic now if you’re at home one thing you can do is put it in access mode (I believe) and connect it to your own home wifi network through the skyportal or skysafari app by programming in your wifi network name and password and it will use your home network to work this only works at home though.

Yes they certainly do I have used Allen keys to adjust the secondary on my Newtonian before and fiddling with them can be a pain, and with the risk of scratching the corrector plate on an sct I wouldn’t even want to try what I did tonight with a screwdriver though it is perfectly possible, Bobs Knobs just make it so much safer and simpler.

I am posting this because I Collimated my Celestron Evolution 9.25” tonight for the first time tonight and it was the first time. I’ll start by saying I read up on how to do it first before I attempted to try it on my scope . It was the first time I Collimated a SCT and it was a bit different looking through eyepiece and lining up the secondary mirror than looking down the optical tube or using a laser collimator like on my Newtonian. I had bought a set of Bobs knobs and installed them to make it easier but it’s not necessary, I waited until it was dark and centered my scope on Polaris and then defocused it and noticed that the concentric rings of light were slightly off center. I placed my finger in front of my scope moving it around (being careful not to touch my corrector plate) until the shadow of my finger was over the part of the rings that were off center. I located the screw that was closest to my finger and began to turn it, the circle of light moved away from the center of view I panicked and turned the screw back had I done it wrong? I quickly tightened the screw back up and I decided to try and different screw but only slightly the circle of light moved off center again I retightened that screw. Ah this must be what is supposed to happen I must have to recenter the star after every adjustment and I am looking at the shadow I realized. I went back to the previous screw and began to adjust it again, each time it reached the edge of the field of view I would re-center it. I noticed that the screw was getting loose so I started tightening the other ones as I went along to compensate, I paused checking the eyepiece after every adjustment and before long the shadow of the secondary was nearly perfectly collimated, and I am no longer paranoid about Collimation. Why am I sharing this because I know that Collimating a scope can be a scary thing especially for beginners and it’s really simple if you read up on it and take your time when you do it.

Thank you I knew it was bright and gold/yellow through my scope so I was fairly sure but starsense is so sensitive to calibration that one wrong one throws of your whole go-to, however I installed my red dot finder scope on the opposite side of my scope yesterday and got it lined up so I can use it now if the star sense ever goes wonky, I can just shut down the scope and do a regular 3 star alignment with the HC.

I own a Evolution 8 and one the things I like about it is that it’s equipped with carrying handles, now I am just moving from my den to my deck because it does have a little weight but not so much that it’s too heavy to carry around and worry I’ll drop it, now if I were taking it to dark site I would take it apart and pack the OTA and mount in the individual boxes they came in and tote the tripod down all separately, but it would be possible if you were careful to carry Evolution up and downstairs plus no power tank it has a built in battery you only need a power tank if you intend on running a lot of astro imaging equipment off of it. But one or two accessories or your phone/laptop you’re good for several hours. As far as extra output bigger is generally better as the more light you’re scope can gather the more you can see the same is true for sct’s

Okay thanks, that’s what I was thinking I should do but I wasn’t entirely sure so I decided to ask here first.

It’s a Celestron 9.25” evolution

My Bob’s Knob’s finally arrived and I’m installing them today and I know to install them one at a time but how do I know when to stop screwing them in?

I just bought a new scope and I don’t want say how much I recently spent on gear for it 😅and have 6” Newtonian and my significant other as well as my family upon finding out asked don’t you have enough astronomical stuff? No it’s never enough 😂

Sounds exactly like what mine has been doing maybe it’s a software issue, and if Celestron is aware of the problem? Seems like the scope should only be allowed to move a maximum of 90 degrees on the alt axis and no further being able to move past it makes me think if one left there scope to goto an object and went inside for something while it did and this issue occurred could it rotate a full 360 degrees and if it can damage the gears in the mount?

Yes it rotated backwards to the west as in the OTA rotated corrector plate up whilst the eyepiece/Star diagonal passed under barely clearing the mount if it had continued to rotate. I initially tried to unlock the clutches when I couldn’t get the scope to respond after I got it to stop but the alt clutch was locked tight. My main concern with rotating that far backwards is damage to the worm gears, I’m not sure if it can strip them out or not. However I took my scope out tonight and it seems that the problem has been resolved 🤞🏻

I took out again tonight and decided to used the Starsense to do an auto alignment, I then used my finderscope mounted opposite to verify it was properly aligned and recalibrated it. Then began issuing goto commands and it worked flawlessly throughout the night Moon, Venus, Beatleguese, Pollux, Arturus and back with no problems I don’t want to jinx it but it may have just needed to be recalibrated again.

Well the mirror has to have a clear image in order for the camera to be able to focus properly on it that’s just how cameras work, now phones do have adaptive focusing that focus an image but that applies more to taking photos where something is either in the background or foreground and the camera is trying to focus on one or the other, so I would say that your scope is in focus and you may need some glasses or if you wear glasses wear them while using your telescope, I wear mine when using my scope and it doesn’t hinder it’s use though you do have to look for eyepieces that accommodate people that wear glasses as they offer better viewing and eye relief for people that wear them.

I was about to ask where you were (hope that’s allowed) because I actually have an extra hand controller that came with my Star Sense Camera but alas as I read along I saw Australia and I am in the US would gladly ship to you if you were in the States just not sure what international shipping costs are never done that before.😆

A few nights ago I was using my goto on my 10 9.25 inch celestron evo with my Star Sense Autoalign Camera and I had to calibrate it because it had been removed from the scope and placed on another breifly, after the calibration it did another autoalign as per its procedure, then I slewed back to the calibration star it was spit on skewed to venus it was off so I decided to do another calibration on Arcturus after I had briefly done some lunar observations that I had manually slew to. I told it to go to arcturus it was off but close I was able to find it by manually slewing the scope I did the calibration and it proceeded to do another autoalign but this time it began to rotate backwards. It moved past 90 degrees and rotated almost 20 degrees before I caught it and stopped it. However the mount locked up and I couldn’t get it to respond through the app so I took it in for the night hooked up the hand controller once inside and was able to get it unlocked and turned it off for the night. Fast forward to last night it’s early so instead of doing an alignment right away I decided to use the finder scope mounted opposite of the starsense to manually slew to venus using the app, then I decided to manually slew to the moon for awhile then I tried to do a two star auto alignment with the finder scope as per the instruction manual choose one star then the dcope choses the second best option and slews to it. Once again it starts to roll backwards only this time I was able to stop it and move it back to its proper position, I tried switching the scope off a setting it to home position and tried again but once again it wanted to go backwards. I just sent my mount to celestron to replace the motor control board and I really don’t want to send it back in again, is this a serious problem will it tear up my scope or is it possible for the OTA to turn 360 degrees on the mount on the Alt axis and do no damage (unless equipment gets in the way) advice or similar experiences would be welcome thank you.

I will also note that a lot of the images the you see people post are edited to or stacked to bring out details as seeing through the atmosphere especially when there are high upper levels clouds or winds can soften the image. I will post a before and after shot of some lunar photos that I took recently so you can see what I am talking about one is a raw image the other has been edited to bring out more detail Basically the same photo except one has been enhanced by changing little details like contrast, shadow, sharpness; and still others Stack multiple images to get those crisp sharp images you see, now the question is how sharp is the image when you look through your scope ? Edited image is top image unedited image is the bottom one.

Not entirely sure it needs collimation the focuser try fine tuning the focuser, barely turning it, I have Celestron 9.25 and the focuser is very sensitive the image can look soft and the I barely turn it almost feather light and it turns crisp and clear. The only way you can truly tell if you are out of collimation is to focus on a bright star and defocus your scope and check the concentric pattern of the rings around the center, also is your star diagonal vertical (at a 90* angle to the scope) if your Star diagonal eyepiece isn’t positioned correctly it can give the impression that you are out of collimation when doing a star test and you can end up doing the opposite and move your scope out of collimation. I noticed this one night when I moved my star diagonal to the side to allow me to sit to the side of my scope and observe, even though I knew it was collimated when I did a star test in that position it showed that it was not but when I returned the diagonal to its original position it showed back in collimation.