Skysync and starsense worth the extra expense?

[Venzen]

Anyone have an opinion on whether, if set up with a C9.25 avx, these two accessories are worth their price in terms of added convenience?

[Cosmic Geoff]

That's up to you and the depth of your pockets.

I have Starsense on a C8 SE, making up a package that can be carried outside and got going within minutes, and the Starsense is worth having to save the faff of doing a star align manually.

I have another Nexstar scope with GPS, which takes about half an hour to get outside and assembled and ready to start imaging. With GPS, the star aligning process is very easy and quick compared with the total setup time, and adding Starsense would offer little.

I'd have GPS on any mount if it was priced at the actual cost of a GPS chip and not at £180 or so.

[Shimrod]

I have starsense on an AVX, and that (along with my ipolar) make setting up much easier and quicker. I control my mount by computer or tablet, so the time and location are taken from those. Unless you move your mount around a lot (by hundreds of miles), then once you have your location set, you only need to enter date and time to get started - Skysync seems to be an expensive way of doing that. A cheaper alternative (if you want to control your telescope by phone or tablet) would be to buy the skyportal wifi adaptor, which will then take location, date and time from your device instead.

[Venzen]

So there is no need to buy Starsense if you have Skyportal?

[Cosmic Geoff]

8 hours ago, Venzen said:

So there is no need to buy Starsense if you have Skyportal?

Did you mean "So there is no need to buy Skysync if you have Skyportal"?

Starsense is an auto-align system; the other devices aren't.

[Dibble]

I bought StarSense Autoalign for my Evo 8 a few weeks ago and love it. I live in Tokyo so very hard to get good alignment without it. I still have to do a 3 step manual align with it (due to lack of enough sky from my balcony) but it's very quick and once I'm done it's very accurate. I use SkySafari / SkyPortal with it and it's great. 

[Brutha]

I bought the Starsense for my 8SE, and love it, much faster to get going than before!

I thought about the gps, but since I only use the scope from the garden it’s a bit pointless, it would only supply the date and time, and that is quick to enter anyway.