Celestron StarSense Explorer DX Review

hey everyone this is slamming in today's video I'm going to be reviewing the celestron star sense Explorer DX now this is the 130 millimeter Newtonian model celestron does have a couple of other models that they've introduced and celestron sent this to me with the specific purpose in mind of having an independent voice review it and test it out and you know me and my channel I've always been independent and always will so I thought I'd be a fun little project to do this telescope in my opinion is designed for beginners and you know that's not a bad thing at all to get new people into the Hobby and and get them learning the night sky if that's what they want to do but it's also I mean pretty handy for the casual observer too if you want to be outside observing in like 5 minutes or less this is really an easy way to go so I've been able to spend the past few weeks with this telescope and this new system really kind of evaluated so today's review hopefully it's not too long but I'm going to to go in-depth on the star sense Explorer and see how it does so to start this review off I wanted to talk about you know why am I making a review of a beginners telescope it's you know it's something I normally wouldn't do right well to be quite honest I'm really intrigued by this whole thing because this telescope uses plate solving technology and plate solving is I would say an advanced technique for astrophotographers and for people that you know do kind of the higher-level astronomy of aligning your telescope so essentially what plate solving is is plate solving uses a camera essentially to take a picture of the night sky and it feeds that picture into software of some sort like planetarium software and that software is responsible for reading where each of those stars are and then at bases it looks at its you know its database and says ok we know exactly which stars these are we know where the telescope is pointing and so that can be kind of a complicated process and what's really intriguing about this telescope is how simple they in literally in under five minutes under 2-minutes you can be outside observing so basically what it's doing is replacing the the camera and your laptop essentially when your plate solving and it's replacing it with your cell phone and it's using the processing power of your cell phone as well to accomplish the plates all so how does this work well there is a mirror under this cover that you will see shortly and basically your tell your your cell phone takes a picture of the night sky and the mirror and your telescope are on the same axis and your cell phone in the celestron star sense Explorer app processes that image that you took and basically tells the telescope or tells the phone where it's located and so if you want to once your line which is really easy once your plate solved you want to go look at an object it will give you coordinates and you just push the telescope over there and it's pretty much that simple you'll find fine motion controls but yeah this is what really intrigued me about the design is a celestron found a way to engineer it into something so simple that you just follow a couple instructions on your smartphone and it does it for you the other big advantage with plate solving is that on a normal computer eyes mount when you you know align it you're putting in your date your time your location and once it's aligned you really can't move it because that database is built in the hand controller in the telescope's brain essentially with plate solving or this setup you can pick up your mount your telescope here move it and the app will you know take another picture it will reconfigure itself and you're good to go you could move it a hundred yards down the road if you want it to okay so let's take a look at the actual smart phone carrier itself and the mirror assembly and how it works so one thing I really like that celestron did is this is rubber they could easily made this plastic on like a you know a beginning type telescope but this is rubber so if you're you know not using a case on your smartphone or something you're not going to to ding it up so that's kind of kind of nice the other thing is it has a nice little handle so you can easily set that in but before we do we are going to take the mirror cover off this is essentially how that works so with the mirror assembly here as I put my cellphone in the cradle you'll notice you guys are getting a view of my kitchen ceiling it's reflecting off the mirror right into my my camera and as I said this mirror and the telescope access are essentially one and the same and then you have fine controls on the back so what you want to do is you want to adjust this to get as much of your field of view open as possible and then what the app will do is essentially it's going to take a picture through there pleat solve it and you're aligned moving the telescope literally could not be any easier all you do is grasp the arm hold everything down and move it so this is your left and right movement or an adjustment in azimuth and then up and down is altitude so yeah pretty easy now once you're getting close to your object that's where you use the slow motion controls so this one adjusts left and right or adjust your azimuth and then this one adjusts up and down for your altitude in that way you can track an object as it moves through the sky if you're viewing it for a little bit or if you're approaching an object you can get it nice and centered in your field of view as I mentioned earlier this thing is incredibly lightweight so much so that I can easily pick it up and lift it above my head so you can easily walk around move it around really take it wherever you need ready to go so that's just another plus for this star sense Explorer so I briefly want to talk about the eyepieces that come with this telescope so it does come with a 25 millimeter eyepiece and a 10 millimeter eyepiece now this telescope is a 650 millimeter focal length telescope meeting that this 25 millimeter eyepiece is going to give you 26 magnification power and this 10 millimeter is going to give you 65 magnification power now I are these eyepieces any good there okay on beginner telescopes you're definitely not paying for the eyepieces these are just kind of thrown in and included and that's kind of the case with any beginner telescope so the eyepieces are just alright what you're really paying for is the telescope so the telescope itself is great the eyepieces themselves I mean for the average beginner they're gonna be fine if you want a little bit more performance you certainly could upgrade them I mean they are plastic and they are pretty finicky but they work so I think that's kind of to be expected with a beginner scope now what's cool about the hundred and thirty millimeter Newtonian is it does include a two inch adapter so if you do want to put two inch eyepieces in the telescope you can they are a little bit heavy on this on this mount but they will work so yeah you can do that too really I mean what I'm just trying to say is you're paying for the telescope telescope works great and if you want to upgrade your eyepieces in the long run if you really enjoy using the scope you certainly can do that something else to note the one and a quarter inch adapter on celestron Newtonian if you unscrew it you expose tea threads so what's really neat is if you have a DSLR with a tearing on it you can attach your camera right to these tea threads and then stick that in the focuser and lock it down I wasn't able to get focus with either of my DSLRs though in the 5 inch Newtonian in celestron 6 inch Newtonian and 8 inch Newtonian I'm and I am able to get focus but not in the 5 inch so I mean if you want to to try it out you certainly can if you want to you know show your friends on what's on the screen or what's on your DSLR you can do that but I was not able to get focused with mine so before I start observing I wanted to give you a little introduction to this app it's very similar to the celestron sky portal app so the official title I believe is celestron star sense Explorer but it's basically a planetarium with lots of information in it so if you're new observer it's pretty neat so let's check this out all right so here's the app and a quick little tutorial on it if you're familiar with the celestron sky portal app the functionality is fairly similar so you shouldn't have a big learning curve what I like most is it it points out all the objects that you know would be good to view for your you know time so if you you know zoom in on things you can find things relatively easily and then also this star at the bottom if you tap on that it will bring up a list of this evenings best objects which is really handy even for expert astronomers this list can come in handy so what's also neat is you know let's say just tap on the plea DS here and 45 it's gonna give me a description a nice picture at the top left there's a Celestia on audio button so if you want to be read to you can tap on that by swiping over you get more information and you can get even more data on it so that's that's pretty neat and if you hit Center it will Center that object in the app the menu has a night vision button on it so if you tap on that you'll get a night vision view to preserve your eyes it's not a true night vision but it does a pretty good job a true night vision is where you would actually take like a red piece of film and put it over your phone or your screen but this one does a pretty good job so I'll just take that off now and then it's just really important to remember to unlock your telescope when you get it so you'll have a little postcard basically that's included that has a code and so you just type that in then you see at the bottom the star sense logo is flashing at me saying hey let's get you uh let's get you aligned so you just tap on that it needs alignment and start from there alright so we're out here with the celestron star sense explorer DX we're all connected to the app so there's a few things I want to do obviously I want to run it like normal and show you that but I also want to test Celeste Ron's claim that you don't need Wi-Fi or data to use this app and based on how it works theoretically that should be true but I want to try that out anyway and then I also want to pick up the telescope and move it and see you know how quickly it realigns to this guy so let's go ahead and jump into the alignment so the first step is just to tap the star sense button and it needs alignment and it's going to ask you to Center the camera over the mirror which we've already done so I'm gonna hit next then it's gonna give you a crosshair and what you want to do is you want to Center a star in the telescope and then once it's centered drag your finger moving the crosshair over that star and then hit done so I'm gonna actually do that with Procyon so I'm gonna move over there right now and then I'm going to use the fine motion controls okay so Procyon a centered here so I'm gonna Center it on the phone now and tap Done okay telescope position found follow location to find your object so right now I'm on Venus actually gonna move that let's find something well I guess we can we can try and shoot for that stuff go over here perfect right in the eyepiece bright as ever that's pretty awesome okay so obviously my screen recording software and the star sense Explorer app didn't work so well with my older phone so I'm actually just gonna do it without the screen recording app and show it to you with my main camera okay so we're gonna tap these flashing star cents button at the bottom here and tap needs alignment center camera over mirror and make sure night mode is checked okay so you can see all Ryan here I'm gonna hit next and now what I need to do is Center a star in the telescope so I'm actually going to pick let's go with Betelgeuse since it's been in the news lately so I'm going to move up to Betelgeuse okay and I'm gonna use this slow motion controls to Center that alright so now that that's centered I'm going to zoom in these crosshairs and get right over Betelgeuse okay now hit done ed okay finding telescope position BAM there we go so we're right on Betelgeuse now so now this this app basically becomes a planetarium where you can start selecting objects and move right over that to them so if I hit a Ryan Nebula I can just go right on down to it and my iPhone se is a little bit slow and I'm a little bit too fast so I have to wait for it to take another picture of the sky okay so I'm right on the Orion Nebula let me check it out yep right in the eyepiece beautiful as ever actually pretty good contrast free for a five inch reflector beautiful okay so as I was saying earlier I was showing you the Pleiades which is a personal favorite so let's go over to that so it locate here go over here yeah nice and locked in let it take another picture of the sky plate solve that okay all right so Pleiades is in the center let's see yep right in the center a lot of the Pleiades actually really like the Hyades 2p at ease so if I scroll out here and tap on that just scroll right over to it so you can see just how easy this app is and how great it is for beginners to learn the night sky and what can be what can be viewed I'm not gonna lie I think this is pretty game-changing technology for a beginner telescope alright so I mentioned that I wanted to try this on airplane mode without a cell signal and without Wi-Fi so let's put it on airplane mode and let's move it so right now we're on the Orion Nebula let's go to Bellatrix let's just move up there real quick and it should take a image of the sky and realign itself yep there we go right in the center awesome so yeah you do not need a cell signal to use this so the last test I want to do is to see how fast the phone realigns the telescope when you pick it up and move it so right now we are centered on Aldebaran so let's pick the telescope up move it move back down to Aldebaran and check that out it's pretty much instantaneous under three seconds that is awesome so you know if you're out camping with your friends and a tree is blocking an object you can just pick up the telescope and move it and you are good to go all of this while you are on airplane mode - so yeah that is really really cool so I've been making this review for six weeks now you can't tell I've gone through a lot of clothes changes haircuts I've shaved a couple times but what's been awesome is just how much I've been able to test this I've been able to grab it pull it outside for 10 to 15 minutes every few nights or so and this app has not given me any problems at all except when there's a lot of clouds and that's obvious because you can't plate solve when there's clouds so it's just been awesome - to test this thing out and be able to play with the software and it does a really good job there's not much else to say all right everyone well that is my review of the celestron star sense Explorer DX really neat product from celestron here obviously the app works really well gets you up and running almost immediately so really great product for beginners and and those that just want to get outside so thanks so much for watching again hope you enjoyed this review have a good one and clear skies as a bonus if you're a beginner and manuals make you want to rip your hair out click here for a complete setup of the celestron star sense Explorer DX where I show some tips and tricks to get you running as quickly as possible

Channel: AstroBlender

Views: 163,768

Rating: 4.8333993 out of 5

Keywords: Celestron, StarSense, Explorer, DX, Newtonian, Refractor

Id: LY929ih9-7Q

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020