Celestron StarSense Explorer 114LT - Ultimate Review

hey everyone be sure to stay tuned until the end of this video where i show you how to take a picture of this distant star cluster ngc 457 with a cell phone and this telescope hey everyone john reed here professional amateur astronomer and author of 50 things to see with the telescope i'm making this video because i'm intrigued by this new telescope from celestron they're calling it the star sense explorer tm lt 114az smartphone app-enabled newtonian reflector telescope the idea is that you can use your phone to guide the scope to targets in the night sky well i picked this telescope up on bnhoto.com for exactly 100 so let's see if it works this is learn to stargaze [Music] so the starsense lineup seems to have four different versions there's an 80 millimeter refractor a 102 millimeter refractor this model which is a 114 millimeter reflector and then a larger 130 millimeter reflector for those that don't know reflectors use mirrors to collect light from space while refractors use lenses in the star sense series you have two low end versions labeled lt and two high-end versions labeled dx in addition to the size difference the dx editions come on mounts with slow motion controls which are really great for getting the telescope pointed at the right place and tracking objects as they move across the sky it also looks like the dx models give you the ability to connect large two-inch diameter eyepieces now when looking at these telescopes aside from the star sense technology the lt versions appear to be competitively priced with prices currently around 200 us dollars while the dx models however are coming in at around 400 us dollars which seems high compared to their competitors but i'm guessing celestron is expecting the star sense technology to make up the gap now for this model specifically the interesting thing for me is the focal ratio they've chosen focal ratio is focal length divided by aperture this affects magnification as well as how bright objects will appear in your eye lower filter ratios offer less magnification but brighter views high focus ratios like in this one offer high magnification but make it more difficult to make out details on faint objects like galaxies most small newtonian telescopes seem to be at around f4 or f5 this scope is f9 which means that this telescope is really designed specifically for the moon and planets the larger more expensive 130 millimeter reflector is f5 which would perform much better on galaxies and nebula so i've watched a few other reviews on this telescope on youtube and most of the reviews are glowing the star sense seems to work pretty well based on these videos it looks like starsense is picking out the best and brightest targets which makes sense but if you look at our night sky tonight at around 10 p.m and this is october of 2020 we've got jupiter and saturn and mars and the moon which are clearly the brightest objects in the sky followed by the pleiades rising in the east now these types of targets are easy to find in any telescope no star sense required now where star sense would be awesome is in locating more obscure objects like galaxies m81 and m82 which are a little bit more difficult to find that said this scope is targeted at beginners and i think the reason these scopes review well is that they're targeted at folks who just want to see the moon and the rings of saturn if they see any deep sky objects like a galaxy that's really a bonus i'm actually really excited to see what this telescope can do and if you have this telescope or are thinking of purchasing it i hope this video really helps you to get the most out of your new scope so let's unbox this and see what we've got q time lapse so as i said i bought this telescope used on b hooder.com so it looks like some of it's been assembled already but it looks like everything's here we've got a 25 millimeter eyepiece providing 40 times magnification we've also got a 10 millimeter eyepiece and this will provide 100 times magnification we've also got a 2x barlow for doubling the magnification now for the most part unless you're viewing the planets the 25 millimeter eyepiece without the barlow is the eyepiece you'll want to use the most use this eyepiece to find the targets and then zoom in by changing to the 10 millimeter eyepiece or adding the barlow remember that you'll need to refocus the telescope after each eyepiece change in addition to the star sense iphone holder you've also got a basic red dot finder which is actually my favorite method for finding objects in the night sky now it looks like the battery was already inserted and if i turn it on we can test to see if it works and there you have it you can see the red dot through the finder right there so we've got good battery in this it's always smart to have replacement batteries for your binder on hand these are 2032 batteries and they can be purchased at a dollar store now this is a newtonian telescope and sometimes these telescopes need to be collimated which simply means that the mirrors need to be lined up correctly now it does look like this telescope needs to be collimated i'm wondering if maybe that's why the previous owner returned it to the store but before i collimate this telescope let's put it together cue another time lapse one cool feature is included in the mirror cover so the center of the mirror cover comes off and what this is for is so that if you're viewing the moon and it's really bright you can put the mirror cover back on the telescope without the little central uh puck here and that will help with the brightness of the moon making it easier to see so the scope also comes with one slow motion control and this controls slow motion in the altitude axis this helps to track the target as it moves across the sky but you'll also have to use a little bit of left right motion as well so i just realized that a laser collimation will not work for this telescope and the reason is i'm going to use a chopstick to demonstrate it here there is a little correcting uh lens of some sort inside the focusing assembly and that disrupts the laser beam so we'll need to collimate this telescope the old-fashioned way and it looks like we're able to do that so to culminate or align the mirrors the old-fashioned way i've drilled a hole in the center of the eyepiece hole cover and what you're going to do is place this where it goes in in the eyepiece slot and you're going to look in and the first thing you're going to want to do is just make sure that you can see the mirror clips on the primary mirror at the back of the telescope and you want to make sure that those are spaced evenly along the sides of your field of view when you look in if the mirror clips on the primary mirror are not all equally spaced around the circumference of your field of view what you're going to do is you're going to take off this little cap here in the center of the spider assembly and you have a central screw you're going to loosen that and then with an allen wrench you're going to adjust the three adjustment screws here until those mirror clips are centered hopefully you don't have to do this this should have been done at the factory and should stay in place for the life of the telescope the second thing you want to do is look in and compare the lengths of these spider arms they should all be of equal length if they're not what you do is you need to loosen these three screws here that hold the mirror in place and then use these adjustment knobs until the spider arms are all the same length when you're looking in here and so let's do that now so now the telescope is collimated i'm going to re-tighten these three screws at the back and then i'm gonna check once more just to make sure those spider arms are of equal length they are now that the telescope is assembled we can take it outside and prepare the scope for viewing the night sky so the most important thing about setting up a telescope is making sure that the finder scope and the eyepiece are pointed at exactly the same spot in the sky so we've got mars here so i'm going to use mars so the first thing i always do is check the red dot finder and make sure that that is pointed perfectly at the target now that doesn't mean now if i go to the eyepiece that meyers will be in here and centered but we can check so what i'm going to do is just take a second to center that okay so now that myers is centered in the eyepiece we're going to go back to the finder scope or in this case red dot finder and we're going to adjust a knob here and a knob here until mars is centered now this telescope is good to go for the night and we can move on to the star sense now that the telescope is set up it's time to set up the app you're going to download it from the app store and then type in your unique code so when you've turned the starsense app on you're going to put the star sets onto the telescope i know this is a little hard to see but very often here so the mirror cap has been taken off so you should be able to see the mirror right above the phone now so i've just opened the app and the first thing we want to do is hit this button at the bottom here and then we want to say needs alignment you're going to hit night mode to on and it's going to show the sky now if it doesn't show the sky you've got the two adjustment knobs on the bottom and that just means that the cell phone needs to be lined up to the sky so i can go left right up and down and you'll see that after a second or so the phone is adjusting okay so after we've got most of the phone covered with an image of the sky i can see orion right here for example hit next okay now what we need to do is get a bright star in the eyepiece i'm going to use betelgeuse i'm going to make sure beetlejuice is in the finder and beetlejuice is centered in the eyepiece there now going back to the phone you can zoom in using two fingers and i'm gonna make sure that i place the crosshairs directly over that star and click done okay now the telescope is going to think about it for a moment it's actually taking photos of the sky and now as i move the telescope it knows exactly where it is in the sky and every time i stop it takes more pictures and recalculates so it never loses its position now we've got two options here for finding things we can look at tonight's best which is an okay list it doesn't really tell you in my case what's behind the neighbor's house or behind my house or behind that tree and you know so you sort of have to already know this guy already to be able to use this i found so what i usually do is pick a list of targets ahead of time and then pick them out of the search for example one of my favorite targets ngc i'm just going to search for 4 57 search wow there's a lot of 457s ngc 457 search there we go the owl cluster and now what you're going to do is hit this button here at the bottom locate and then you just move the telescope following the directions on the screen until you've found your cluster so basically you want to get near the cluster you want to stop it's going to take another photo of the sky and then you'll be able to fine tune the scope to just the right spot so with the target perfectly centered in the app we can see if it's centered in the eyepiece not so much but i know what i'm looking for so then i can go and make the final adjustment right here okay so now i've put a phone adapter on the telescope so you can see what this looks like this cluster is nicknamed the et cluster from the steven spielberg movie and i'm sure you can put your et looking at you with outstretched arms now i'm using an app called nightcap set to video mode it's taking one frame per second and that's controlled with the slider on the right and i've set the iso that's the slider on the left just so that the image looked as best as it could and now we all want to take pictures with our telescopes but with a scope this size your only practical option is with a cell phone now i've covered planetary and lunar images in several other videos so this time i wanted to try something a little different i've tried to take single pictures of clusters with this telescope but none of them turned out very good at all so i'm going to use a trick that a lot of astronomers use and i'm going to use this video instead to create the image now i'm not sure you can see it here but there are light clouds in the sky here so bear with me on this i'm sure if you try this yourself your image will turn out even better than mine all right so now we've got the file from the phone onto the computer and what we're going to do is turn this video into a picture so i'm using a pc you could do this as well on a mac using software called linkios now on the pc we're going to use two pieces of software the first is called pipp and the second is called deep sky stacker and you can find both these pieces of software free on the internet the first thing i'm going to do is drag the video onto pipp and you'll see a little demo of what the video looks like right here just one frame now pipp is used to turn this video into pictures now the video contains 168 frames and the first thing i'm going to do is just take the middle of those frames so i'm going to take from frame 30 to frame 120 and that's so i don't get any shakiness from the first part of the video as the telescope settles down or shakiness from when i stopped the video the other thing i can do is mess with some of these processing options and see what they do to the image so for example stretching the histogram brings out the stars a little more we can see that there set histogram to black point we can experiment and see what that does makes it a little bit darker as well let's keep that on i'm also going to crop the image we can go back here we can see that this image or sorry this video is 1920 pixels wide and 178 pixels tall and so i'm going to crop the width to a 1000 and the height to 900 and that will just eliminate some of that vignette that was around the original video okay i'm going to leave these settings alone in the output i'm going to make sure that this is a tiff file so a tiff file is just an image file and tiff is popular in astronomy for editing images leaving everything else the same we're going to go over to processing and click start processing and that just takes a second and now we've got a file folder containing all the frames from that video as pictures so now we can close pipp open deep sky stacker i'm going to ctrl a to select all these pictures and drag them into deep sky stacker these are light frames i'm going to click ok now i don't use deep sky stacker very much i only know they're very very basic so i'm not going to change any settings all i'm going to do is select register check pictures and make sure that stack after registering is selected that's all i'm going to do okay and now i'm going to hit ok and this will take about five minutes to process on my computer okay and okay all right now we've got our final image now i know it looks a little overexposed don't worry about that just save this picture to file name it this is ngc 457 457 save and now we can go back here and see our image there you have it that looks pretty darn good so now you could go into photoshop and take out some of this noise if you want and brighten the stars but ultimately you can see the difference between the picture that we got from the video and here is the picture i took by just hitting um taking a single exposure on the camera so there's quite a quality difference right there [Music] so here are my thoughts on both the telescope itself and the star sense technology first the telescope so for the moon and planets this is an okay first telescope it gets the job done however when you graduate to deep sky objects like nebula and star clusters i found the telescope to be a little underpowered even compared to telescopes of similar size there are two reasons for this the first is the extra glass inside the focuser the extra lens is included to increase the magnification but there's a trade-off let's say the extra lens is doubling the magnification then objects will appear about four times as dim which takes a lot of deep sky objects off the table now the second reason is common to all small newtonian telescopes the secondary mirror is obstructing quite a bit of light and for whatever reason and maybe this is a little bit subjective deep sky objects lack the contrast that you might see in a refractor telescope that's the one with lenses of a similar size and then there's this mount the mount is quite light and i found that i had to move past my targets and then let the scope settle into place i did find this tiny slow motion control helpful for compensating for the sloppy pointing now the more expensive dx versions of this telescope have slow motion controls on both axis and this would make those telescopes much easier to point and the dx versions of these telescope also have lower focal ratios and higher apertures which means that deep sky objects will appear brighter all other things being equal and now onto star sense i'd have to say i'm impressed star sense is brilliant it doesn't get you precisely on target but it gets you pretty darn close and the app just works and it works well that said when you get to the eyepiece you still really have to know what you're looking for star clusters galaxies and nebula appear fairly dim through any telescope and if you don't know what to expect it might be hard to know exactly what you're looking at i also found the app hard to use when it was in night vision mode but if you're using it without night vision turned on then you're ruining your night vision and deep sky objects will be doubly hard to see all said and done i can't wait to continue testing star sense on more challenging targets maybe just not with this particular telescope i have recommended the larger dx versions because i think at that price point around 400 us dollars those scopes offer the best value in a telescope with the assisted pointing that comes with the star sense system well i hope you enjoyed this video on the starsense explorer lt114az telescope i try to post a new video about every week so please subscribe so you don't miss the next one and if you're having trouble getting to see cool stuff in your new telescope please consider purchasing 50 things to see with the telescope this book will teach you how to use your new telescope to see awesome stuff in the night sky well everyone until next time the future is looking up you

Channel: LearnToStargaze

Views: 18,441

Rating: 4.9146667 out of 5

Keywords: stargazing, telescope, starsense

Id: oWbGQgDffVg

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021