The price of the Celestron Starsense Accessory has arrived!!!

[M4lcs67]

Just looked on the FLO website and seen this

http://www.firstligh...-accessory.html

Price is much more realistic than another well know UK astro retailer who are also advertising it (probably at the full retail price).

I'm assuming that it must be ready to drop as the prices of it are beginning to appear onto many UK retailers websites now.

I must say I was a little bit disappointed when I saw it advertised for sale in the UK a couple of weeks for considerably more than FLO, when it is for sale in the States much cheaper and when you take into account the pound / dollar exchange rate, I did have a bit of a moan as I thought we poor UK astronomers were being had again, but having seen what FLO have it up at my confidence is restored.

Just got to wait now for someone to buy one, use it and give a review.

[umadog]

It's a nice idea but it's rather expensive, no? I can do a 2 star alignment in under 3 minutes right now. So this thing saves no time, it just add whizz-bang factor. Am I missing something?

[starnut]

Am I missing something?

A lot if you buy it ........

[M4lcs67]

Hey umadog.

What mount do you have???? I suppose when you have done a basic alignment all you need to do is keep on adding more calibration stars to add accuracy?

[Pig]

How will it know if the alignment it finds matches that of the scopes field of view ?

I'm guessing there is a prompt the handset readout

[jabberwocky]

How do you align it with your scope? I know it sits in your finder bracket, I assume you can see what it sees on a laptop screen?

[umadog]

Hey umadog.

What mount do you have???? I suppose when you have done a basic alignment all you need to do is keep on adding more calibration stars to add accuracy?

I have an ArgoNavis & ServoCat on my big Dob. The standard alignment is vertical plus two stars and that's accurate enough for visual observing. It has ways of improving pointing accuracy if you need this, but you don't do so simply by adding more stars. As I understand it, there are two major sources of pointing error. One is that you didn't do a good alignment. The second is that there are imperfections in the mount (e.g. component flexure, and backlash) and the computer knows nothing of these. The system has two approaches for providing higher accuracy. The first technique is to do a local alignment, which improves accuracy in a 5 degree area. That's a ServoCat feature, IIRC. The ArgoNavis has a fancier feature called TPAS (I don't remember what the acronym means). The way that works is that you do the 2 star alignment and then devote the next hour or so to doing about 100 alignments across the whole sky. The computer calculates where it thinks the object should have been and you tell it where it actually was. It then builds a mathematical model that describes the pointing errors for your mount and it stores the model in non-volatile memory. You only have to do this once, but in the future the scope can use this model to improve pointing accuracy. So in the future the Argo is able to cancel out your scope's idiosyncrasies and get pointing accuracies that are pretty high: I'd guess to within a 1/10th of a degree or so, but I'm not sure. In any case, it's good enough to get the target onto a small CCD.

[Pig]

Sounds pretty useful if that's the case