RobertI

Perfect, everything the keen astronomer needs, premium refractor and mount, spacious 4x4, and floppy hat. 🙂

I just bought myself a Celestron Starsense Explorer 70LT - basically a cheap achro refractor with an attachment for your mobile phone, allowing you to use Celestron’s Starsense technology via an app on your phone to find objects. I’ve just been out for a couple of hours, and I’ll cut to the chase - it’s just brilliant. It made finding objects so easy, that I almost felt I was cheating. Suffice it to say that with my cheap 70mm achro made mostly of plastic, within the space of a few minutes I had found and observed globulars M13 and M3, galaxies M81, M82, planetaries NGC6543 (the Cats Eye nebula) and NGC6826 (the Blinking Planetary), the Eastern Veil (kind of), and open cluster M39. Each time I searched, Starsense did its thing, guiding me to the object with helpful arrows, taking an image to platesolve when it senses the telescope has stopped moving, and guiding me the final few minutes of arc the object - every single time the object was clearly in the field of view of a 66 degree 20mm eyepiece at 35x magnification, giving a FOV of 1.9 degrees. I should add that there was a bright moon in the sky, but I kept well away and everything worked fine. If I wanted to move around the garden to get a better view, no problem, Starsense was unaffected - this was weird for someone who has been used to not touching a tripod once a mount is aligned. 

As for the scope itself, the mount is very wobbly and the eyepieces leave a lot to be desired, but when I added a decent-ish WO 20mm eyepiece (a lightweight eyepiece was needed and this fitted the bill) the views improved dramatically and the scope produced some really nice views. I think the correct image diagonal also helped to make the experience seem easy. There are a number of other scopes, including newts and SCTs, but they all seem to live on wobbly mounts and tripods which is a shame. The exceptions are the 8” and 10” dobs which look like perfect companions for starsense. 

Definitely a success and I will be looking at how to convert this for use on my other scopes. 👍

1 hour ago, tomato said:

I asked FLO if they knew of any imminent plans for a Celestron  to do this but they didn’t know of any. I guess at this point  Celestron would like you to buy into their scope hardware, as the margin on the StarSense units alone might be a bit slim. Mind you, some folks are buying the cheapest scope package  and using the scope as a doorstop, so perhaps they could charge North of £100 and still get the volume?

From my memory on the Cloudy Nights forum, Celestron’s response was that they wanted to keep the solution as foolproof as possible and selling it separately for attaching to any scope would introduce more potential for going wrong, which I totally understand. They did say they monitor the situation and wouldn’t rule it out in the future. That’s me paraphrasing by the way , I think I got the gist of it. 

6 hours ago, M40 said:

I'm not using either a reducer or flattener so the telescope is at it's native focal length of 560mm and f6.5. My thoughts are to keep life as simple as possible until I run out of targets but with the weather the way it is, I cant see me changing anytime soon 🤣

TBH with those results I don’t think you need a reducer or flattener! Keep up the good work. 👍

25 minutes ago, Sunshine said:

So I take it you'll be adapting the module to the Stellalyra? you'll have a blast!!

I’ll probably adapt it to my 102ED-R to start with then my C8. I don’t have a Stella Lyra dob …..yet! 🙂 I’ll probably try the approach of fitting it to a ball head so it can be oriented, therefore does not have to sit on the top of the OTA, and fit to a standard finder shoe bracket. 

13 minutes ago, Sunshine said:

Maybe this is something you should look at

I’ve literally just done it! A 70mm Explorer frac is on the way! Of course I justified it by promising the scope to my 8 year old (after its separation from Starsense of course). 😀

18 minutes ago, Sunshine said:

That's great! I first saw this awesome chain just recently in my 8" dob, seems like you had a spectacular wide field view of the whole chain.

Thanks! Sadly I didn’t manage to fit the whole thing in with my C8 plus 0.63 reducer. The widest I could get was with the 24mm 68 degree eyepiece at 50x but the skies were too bright to see the whole chain, so going up to a 10mm giving 130x revealed the whole thing, albeit at a very narrow FOV. Both FOV shown below. 
 

21 minutes ago, josefk said:

Nice @RobertI - you're getting further up the chain with both your scopes than i've managed with mine these past two nights - i keep falling off the tight rope after 4435/4438 and haven't attempted to come in from the other end yet.

Can you achieve nice contrast in your skies there? I'm in semi-rural - SQM 20.8 to 21.1 ish on a moonless night.

Thanks, my skies sound similar to yours, various sources estimate Bortle 4 SQM 20.8, they never look terribly dark! 

43 minutes ago, M40 said:

Many thanks, edited the post now to include asi290mm and heq5. I have a very basic setup using no filters and i tend to leave the histogram as is, but my next baby step is to include darks.

That’s great to hear, I’ve also got an asi290mm which i bought to replace the Lodestar I used for many years, but not had a chance to use it yet. Your results bode well. 🙂

Are you using a reducer and or flattener? I normally use an rc6 reduced to f5 ish giving a focal length of around 700mm, but with image scale you are getting I’m thinking I could use something smaller. 

56 minutes ago, M40 said:

First break in the clouds for what seems weeks, so blowing the dust off...

M101, 6 x 30 seconds using 85mm stellamira and asiair. Also managed to get a supernova which is going to be visible for the next couple of months and is the closest to us for a decade at a mere 21 million light years away.

M106, 15 x 10 seconds using 85mm stellamira and asiair. Also managed to get NGC 4248 to the upper right.

Well happy with this pair

These are really super pictures with a very modest sized scope - what camera and mount are you using? I love the contrast and detail that you get with black and white. 👍

4 minutes ago, Zermelo said:

 

Thanks! Not sure how I missed that massive thread! 

@bosun21 @Highburymark Do you guys have any idea how big the database is? I’m assuming there’s plenty of NGCs in there and not just a dumbed down list of the brightest objects? 

Thanks Mercea, interesting to hear your approach to observing faint fuzzies. 👍

5 minutes ago, bosun21 said:

I just bought the cheapest Starsense scope (LT70) which is under £200 and removed the Starsense unit to fit on the dobsonian. It works great.

What a great idea, I may do this! Was it easy to fit?

2 minutes ago, AstroKeith said:

The addition of plate-solving is indeed significant.

I've made my own solution (which is widely being copied now), but even my DIY solution costs about £300. Although it is significantly more accurate and integrated than the StarSense dobs. Most of the cost is the camera.

https://astrokeith.com/equipment/efinder/

There's quite a difference in size and weight between 10" and 12" - is that a factor for you?

Being a longtime sufferer of 'aperture fever' I'd go with the 12"!

Thanks Keith. Your solution looks nice, and would probably also work well with my little EAA setup. As regards your question, weight and size - possibly not an issue, as I may leave it outside undercover. But the other two factors are, is 10” a big enough jump from my 8” SCT, and is 12” really going to yield significant benefits over a 10” from my semi-rural, but small housing estate location?

I’ve been idly contemplating larger apertures, in particular dobs, and have been impressed with the reviews of the Celestron Starsense dobs. But it comes at a cost. At £845 the 10” StarSense dob is nearly £300 more than than the Sky-Watcher equivalent without Starsense. For another £40 you could get a nice Stella Lyra 12” Dob with dual speed focuser. But the 10” Starsense is a really fantastic product, and I have to confess, I am tempted. 10” Starsense or 12” Stella Lyra? 🤔

PS: I also can’t help thinking that equivalent, and cheaper retrofit products like StarSense on mobile phone will start to appear from other providers in the not too distant future, but I guess that’s another story……

Edit: Celestron may well have sewn up the market by patenting their technology, I found a couple of patents that look very much like the Starsense technology and the use of Starsense for manual pointing, perhaps we won’t see anything to rival Starsense on mobile phone anytime soon…. 

 https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=US76834954&_cid=P21-LHX94Q-79281-1
https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=US342394896&_cid=P21-LHX94Q-79281-1

3 hours ago, Mike Q said:

After many months of clouds , cold and generally sub par skies, tonight the clouds (mostly) went away and ledt us clear skies in North Central Ohio.  The temp was a balmy 55 degrees F and 74% humidity as the set up started.  Dew control was going to be a challenge and the heaters were on even before darkness fell.  I put the light shroud on the 16 as protection against dew as i dont have heaters for it as of yet.  I also ran its three fans the entire time.  The wife set up the Stellina and when darkness fell... We were off to the races.  I actually had a list of things that we were looking at but it got soaked.... Along with everything else and it is no longer readable.  We were not in a big hurry tonight and hit just a few targets in the two hour session. She sent "the robot" off to M101 while i was off to Venus.  It looked decent in the 10, but in a 16 with the 8.5mm ES eyepiece, i believe I was seeing detail in cloud structure.  Had i toned it down with a filter i am sure i would have seen more.  Since Mars was in the same general direction.... Why not.  Not really a lot going on with Mars, even in the 16 it wasnt all that and a big bag of chips.  I stopped for a bit and savored some fine Kentucky bourbon and just kind of watched the sky for a bit and got back to it.  The Ring in the 10 and a 14mm was its normal ghostly blue and i still swear i can just make out the remnants of the star in the center.  In the 16 with a 20mm, well adverted vision, you dont need that.  We bounced around looking at some clusters as most of our favorites are still below or just above the horizon.  Finally it was time for good old M13.  In the 10 with the 14mm, well thats just a good picture, move the 14mm to the 16.... yeah that was truly a oh wow moment and easily the image of the night winner.  It was our first decent night in months, but it was far from perfect.  The skies looked clear initially but there were still some stability issues going on up there.  Some place to the south it seems that they added some more lights as it definitely seemed brighter in that direction and overall the sky never really got black, it seemed like it was more a dark blue.  But i am not going to complain.  Two hours is twice the amount of time i have had for all the sessions between November and now.  It was a good night.  

On a side note.... the Stellarvue 13x80 finder scope on the 16 inch.... worth every penny.  There is nothing like basically having a frac on your reflector as a finder.

I attached a couple of pics, one is of our set up and the other shows the dew that the 10 inch collected.  You can see where the heaters stopped the dew.  This wouldn't be considered a heavy dew either.  

Nice setup you have there Mike, must make for comfortable observing. Would be good to see some results from the Stellina some time. 🙂

26 minutes ago, IB20 said:

open cluster Stephenson 1 looking marvellous as usual; to my eye delta lyrae has a greenish colouration to it that I’ve seen in no other star.

Lovely report, glad you are enjoying your 102ED. You’ve highlighted a couple of interesting objects to look out for. 

Last time out I enjoyed some fuzzy delights in Virgo with the 102ED and promised myself that I would investigate Markarian’s chain in the C8 next time out. Tonight looked pretty good so I gave it a go. After finding M84 and M86 making up the bottom of the chain, I moved up to the fainter ‘eyes’ of NGC4435 and 4438, then up to NGC4461 (its 12th magnitude companion NGC 4458 was too faint), then 4473 and finally 4477. I was really pleased to have got the whole chain. I found higher magnification helped. I started at around 40x with the 32mm Plossl, but could only see one of the eyes, but upping the magnification really improved things and I found around 100 - 120x to be the best. Looking back my previous report I was surprised to see that I had got both the eyes in the 102ED, so it’s obviously a good deep sky scope despite its small aperture. I’ll set them up side by side if a get a chance. 
 

3 minutes ago, Franklin said:

Were you using a Polarizing filter? or just the ND3 in the wedge?

It was just the wedge, no filter, I did consider digging out the polarizer, but actually at that magnification it wasn’t bright at all. 

2 minutes ago, Sunshine said:

Wow that looks like a super clean and sharp view through that WL wedge.

Thanks, yes it was remarkable actually, I wish the photo could show the incredible detail visible at the eyepiece. Still, I can’t help wanting one of those lovely Lunt solar scopes.  

102ED-R out this afternoon with BV at around 160x. Lovely detail visible on Sol before it disappeared behind the rooftops. Bino-bandit is a great addition for solar viewing. 

Lovely report, interesting results with the filters, I’ll give it a go. What is ADC btw?

Very tired after a manic two weeks at work, but determined to get outside as I’ve missed many clear moonless nights. The first thing that came to hand was my 60mm RACI finder, and putting in a 17.5mm Morpheus gave a nice 12x magnification. In a bright sky I was pleased to very quickly track down galaxies M81 & M82, M51, globulars M13, M56 and M3 and the very large cluster Melotte 111, fitting into the FOV. That was good enough to get my fix and still get some sleep. Why doesn’t someone manufacture a nice pair of right angled 10x50s which can be hand held - surely they’d be winners with us astronomers? 

19 hours ago, Sunshine said:

After seeing so many galaxies this past weekend I developed a sudden interest in AP, somebody please smack me. If you don’t my wife certainly will when she sees the bill for AP gear.

If you enjoy self-flagellation, you will enjoy AP immensely.