Celestron StarSense: Set-Up, Alignment, & Calibration

hey everyone this is Lyman today I'm partnering up with celestron to bring you a video of the celestron star scents with a focus on installing setting it up aligning it and calibrating the star scents unit this is a really neat product and so I hope if you watch today's video all the way through it will answer all of your questions that you have about using this device and setting it up so there'll be two versions of this video one version for using the sky portal app and the other for aligning using the hand controllers and that's what today's version is is the hand controller versions so shrink a screen telescopes typically have two spots to mount accessories one where your finder scope is and the other off to the right this middle spot is for a nother rail so if you want to mount a rail on top so I'm gonna put my star sense bracket right here and I don't really see a need to have a finder scope if you're going to be using star cent so I'm actually going to remove my finder scope too and it's just a good general rule of thumb that when you install a new accessory that your telescope is in the vertical position just so in case something slips or Falls you have a better chance of catching it before it falls so I'm going to go ahead and remove these now and I mean you could even put your telescope on the floor and do this too okay so I'm just going to install the large schmidt-cassegrain bracket here line up those holes there you go tighten that down just make sure that's straight a little off alright so I'm just gonna tighten this down yeah that looks pretty straight nice and easy that's simple we're ready to put on the star sins alright so now we just simply slip the star cents over the bracket and tighten down the thumb screws once you have the star sense on the telescope that you want it on simply just plug in your auxiliary cable to the star sense and to the auxiliary port on your mount and just the last up to initially installing your star sense is to remove your original hand controller and install the star sense hand controller it's also really neat about the star sense is it comes with a standard vixen style finder scope bracket so if you want to use the star sense on like a Newtonian or a refractor or any telescope that used as a standard bracket you definitely can just remove my finder scope and secure so I'll show you how to how to to swap them out - so swapping the star sense from the large bracket to the small bracket is really easy just take a four millimeter hex wrench and loosen the bolt in the small bracket a little bit so it's loose okay and then do the same thing on the bracket that the star sense is installed on so this one's a little bit tighter there we go and then you'll know it's loose enough when the star scent starts swinging in the bracket okay so then the next thing you're gonna do is just hold the star sense in place and undo the the shroud to the sensor unscrew this there we go it comes and these will separate and just make sure these orange rings stay in place remove the star sense from that bracket insert the bracket looks like I need to loosen that a little bit more so I'm going to do that all right we'll place the star sense in there nice and loose now that we have the bracket on screw the shroud right back on and it's a lot of threading so make sure that stays straight then once everything is nice and tight I like to just loosen this a little bit more and get the star sent straight and then tighten it back down nice and tight and you swapped out the bracket to the small one so all the swapping brackets for the star sense is really easy and takes under two minutes just realize that if you are swapping things around between telescopes each time you do that you're going to need to recalibrate the star sentence unit if you leave it on the same telescope and you calibrate it each time you do a session you're not going to need to redo that step but when you're swapping between them you will need to recalibrate each time you do that when using the star sense on an equatorial mount there's three things you really need to do number one is you need to level your mount so make sure you do that before you start otherwise you're gonna get some pretty erroneous results number two is you need to make sure that your mount is at the index marks and currently mine is not so I'm going to fix that right now and lastly you need a rough polar alignment so for that I used the polar scope for the celestron advance VX and it just needs to be rough nothing amazing if you don't have a polar scope just look down the bore and if you get Polaris you know nice in the middle or even close that should be good enough so just to reiterate level your mount make sure your mount is set to the index marks and get a ruffler alignment of the mount using star scents the tude azmuth fork-mount is not much different than an equatorial mount you still need to swap out the hand controller so make sure you do that and you really need to make sure that the index marks line up and that the OTA is pointed horizontally so basically the OTA is at the zero Degree position the next rse mount does not have clutches so I'm powering up the telescope to do this so now that those are are lined up everything is horizontal mount is level ready to use star sense essentially really really easy the last thing you need to know before you start a line is if you intend on using the hand controller to align make sure you use the hand controller for your whole session or if you intend on using the sky portal to line make sure you use the sky portal app for your whole session you can't align with the hand controller and then switch to the sky portal and keep that same alignment and vice versa so just make sure you know which method you want to use before you start your alignment so to calibrate the star sense I'm gonna be using a camera today in the telescope rather than a diagonal or an eyepiece and that so I can show you what's going on while I calibrate it normally you know if you're just doing visual use or outreach diagonal with a low power eyepiece is totally fine but like I said I'm just gonna use a camera today so you can see what's going on all right we're ready to go so the first thing we're gonna do is hit a line then you will select star sense Auto set telescope to index okay and we'll just let it do let it do its thing here I'm not doing anything it's just taking my mount across the sky taking a picture and finding a bunch of stars [Applause] so no it's acquiring position and when that's done slowing it'll take an image and then keep going so I'm just gonna let this go here and then I'll be back when it's done it literally took about 120 seconds is all for me alignment complete press ENTER to continue the first thing that you want to do though is make sure that the star sense and the telescope are looking at the same thing and this will improve your alignment accurate accuracy considerably so to begin the calibration process you're going to want to go into the Stars menu and find a fairly bright star so I'm gonna choose Deneb strictly because Vega straight up and I don't want to cream my neck looking at it so let's go to Dan add Slooh over there [Music] all right so now we're on Deneb so what we need to do now is go back all the way in select menu and then find star cents from the menu and hit enter and then hit calibrate so hit enter and then hit enter it's gonna say you know Center star Deneb course centering so you're going to find Deneb and you're going to roughly get it in the center so now I'm gonna switch over to the camera so you can see what I'm doing okay you can see star cents did a pretty good job didn't Deneb is already in my field of view so I'm just going to adjust the directional keys on the hand controller until I get it about centered here I'm using backyard ESO which is a really great program for doing this all right now I hit enter and this is where we do the fine alignment so your motor speed will slow down and I'm on this reticle over on the right hand side I'm gonna try and get this just about perfect Oh a little bit too far there all right keep letting it drift too much there we go perfect now I have a line and it will say calibrate Center processing image and then it will solve it and then it will find the new center you press accept realign is required so during the calibration process once you're done with your rough alignment and your fine alignment it will say realign is acquired you don't want to move your telescope it already knows where it's at so just hit enter and that will go back to the main menu hit a line and then find star sense auto hit enter and it will start the alignment process over again and then when it's done you are all done your setup and your calibrated star sense is ready to go at that point I give you if you're a new star sensing it's your first time make sure you take the cap off the first time I use the star sense I was out there for 15 minutes and I could not get what everyone was raving about star sense you know it's supposed to be so fast and accurate it was going around for 15 minutes I thought gee this isn't gonna burn my motors out I could not figure out what was going on and then I left Oh it'd be great if your cap was off wouldn't it so big tip make sure you take off the cap otherwise you're gonna be sitting there like me not knowing why your star sense isn't working so turn it off power cycled if I returned it to the index mount position took the cap off and then everything worked great so moral of the story is it's it's such an easy thing to do and you don't think about it but yeah take your cap off all right well that is how you set up install align and calibrate a celestron star sense a super neat product and what I really like the most about it isn't just how fast it auto aligns but it's how accurate it is if you take care to make sure everything is up with your mount right to start the star sense is spa armed so awesome product from celestron thanks so much for watching and clear skies

Channel: AstroBlender

Views: 48,304

Rating: 4.917037 out of 5

Keywords: Celestron, StarSense, NexStar, SE, AVX, CGEM, CGX, CGE, Astronomy, Astrophotography

Id: Mc2iEwc-i-s

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2020