HOWTO: Make a POWERFUL smart TELESCOPE! Better than much bigger telescopes!

did you know that within a couple of hours you can build your own automated electronic telescope without any knowledge of astronomy we'll learn how to do this in this video the scope will move to whatever target you want to look at automatically and you'll be able to see the result with light gathering abilities on your smartphone you'll see so much more details than in a standard telescope and you'll have built this with your own hands at a very cheap price compared to other offerings to see how to do all of this stay tuned in this video because we'll go through the whole process hey guys quit the lazy geek here and welcome back to the channel today we're going to go into building this little wonder this fully automated electronic telescope i inspired myself from exist existing commercial offerings like the um ev scope and the stelina uh which are telescopes that you can just like plop down and uh they will you and then you control them with your smartphone they will slew to targets they will give you images of those targets in real time like taken from the telescope in real time with light accumulation technology and display them on your smartphone and you don't need any knowledge of astronomy or astrophotography to do that well we're going to do exactly the same for one-third of the price except that our system will be better and more modular it just requires a bit of effort to put together but don't worry we'll do a step step-by-step instruction in this video so that you too can build your electronic uh automated telescope and learn how to use it under the stars now the first step to getting this project off the ground is to buy what you need so we are going to buy several parts that are available on the market and those parts they're all fully modular because that's the beauty of this build if you get tired of electronic astronomy you can always reuse any of those parts for a serious astrophotography equipment or rig if you want to build one in the future and if like the taste that you get from this electronic telescope lets you makes you want to go into the astrophotography hobby so all that you're doing here nothing is wasted everything is modular reusable and replaceable what we have in here is we have a mount this part here which will track the stars and go to the targets that you want to find and the next part is this part here it is the telescope or lens or whatever you choose to use and this is what is going to be gathering the light from the nebulae the star clusters or whatever we choose to look at we also have this red thing here which is a camera and we have the control center here which is a raspberry pi computer i'll put down below in the description everything that you need to buy but this is the azgti mount it you can typically buy it with a tripod which i heard is really good or you can buy it mount only or head only and then use your own photo tripod to put it on which is what i did in our particular case the telescope itself i've chosen the evo guide 50 ed2 from sky watcher because it's very easy to attach this mount it has a decent focal length and a good focal ratio which is the speed at which the telescope lens gathers photons gathers light from our targets it's also very simple to use is as the camera here i've chosen a zw asi 178mc which is a fairly cheap camera but it is fairly long in the tooth now i chose it because i had it available but there are probably better cameras available now like i believe the 385mc would be one of them to consider and as the brains of the operation i chew i chose a raspberry pi kit that i bought on amazon and it comes for me with four gigabytes of memory i would recommend the either the 4 gigabyte or 8 gigabyte memory uh a raspberry pi for this particular build we also have a usb cable to connect the brains of the operation to the camera the computer will be connecting to the mount over wi-fi so there's no problem here and we'll also need a mobile phone charging battery like this one an external battery to be able to power our little control center here any battery with quick charging uh capabilities should be able to provide enough power for our little control center here for the initial setup you will also require a computer for the control of all of this you will require a smartphone either ios or android and we'll also need a microsd card for using in our little command center here most raspberry pi kits come with an sd card a micro sd card that you can just use as is which works decently well and i'll be making sure that uh everything in here is listed in the description if you want to buy each of those parts once you have the parts available and with you we can get to actually building that system the first step of assembling this setup would be to uh put the mount that's going to track the stars onto the tripod now depending on what you bought you might have bought the mount head only and then you need a photo tripod like this one with a 3 three eighths of an inch um screw at the top and you just uh screw it in or you might have um gotten the version of the mount with a tripod in which case you just use them together as necessary so now you see i've just like screwed the mount in i can also uh tighten this is the clutch for the horizontal axis basically and by tightening it tightening it i make sure that the mount doesn't move on its own so i'm properly tightening on the screw of the tripod if i remove the crutch and i do this the mount itself is turning there's a circle there that turns and it doesn't screw into the tripod anyway anymore or unscrew um while we're at it you you are able to power this mount using a 12 volt dc input here but you can also use batteries eight double a 1.5 volt batteries in here and that way the mount will run off of its own power so here we are and the mount itself with that is in terms of hardware ready now let's have a look at the scope itself so i'm using the old version of the skywatcher evoguide 50ed which didn't come with a proper attachment place or dovetail here at the bottom with the version 2 you should have a dovetail that's green color there uh so don't worry if the shape here is different everything is going to work exactly the same the first thing we want to understand is the objective lens is here this is where the the light from the stars will enter and we'll be putting the camera at the other end and the other end is likely uh closed off by a dust cap so i'm gonna remove that after unscrewing the screws and uh we can do two things to place the camera here your camera may have come with a nose piece like this one in which case you can simply insert the nose piece into after unscrewing the screws into the um the telescope here and then screw in the holding screws to make sure that everything is uh nice and set another potent possibility if you have a zw camera like this one is to remove the nose itself completely uh it might have actually been a little lens that you had on top so you'll want to remove that little lens along with the black ring that's there to get to this part of the camera and then you can also simply screw it into the back of the telescope and this is what i am going to do and with that we've attached the camera to the telescope itself now that we've done this we have both the telescope with the camera attached and the mount on its tripod we can attach both together it's simply a matter of unscrewing this screw that protrudes inside the attachment um area here and then we're just going to slide the dovetail here the attachment plate into this groove and for you again it would be a green attachment placed uh if you chose this scope for me i just had to um to retrofit my scope and you just slide it in screw in the screw here and now it is properly put inside the cramp clamp so it's in the clamp there's no problem at all and it's firmly attached to the mount so that's in terms of setting up the mount and the telescope together for our next part we'll need a micro sd card along with a micro sd card reader the micro sd card actually came for me with my raspberry pi kit and i'll just now use um my computer to actually prepare the sd card to work with the raspberry pi module the first thing that we need to do on the computer is go to stellarmate.com you'll have the links in the description down below but you will need to create an account and you will want to buy the product called stellar mate os it costs i believe around 50 us dollars while you are purchasing that os you will be asked to create an account so the next step will be to sign in to be able to download the stellar mate os that we are going to use to control everything here once it is downloaded we are going to basically burn that image to the microsd card to do so we are going to go to etcher.io again we'll have the links in the description then we are going to download for windows click the download button and install this the install process for etcher is very simple you double click the downloaded executed file you agree and that's pretty much all there is to it once the install is done it should open up with the etcher window and here we have it i will choose flash from file and we are going to select the stellar mate os image file that we just downloaded from the stellar mate website so here it is from my downloads folder i will just double click that to open it and now we need to select our target to select our target your microsd card must be plugged into your pc and recognized by your pc you will want to be very careful about which drive you select just to make to be sure because you do not want to flash this on a drive where you would lose all of your data if you choose the wrong drive so here i am choosing definitely my micro sd card and the next step is just to click on the flash button and it is going to ask you whether you want to make changes to the device you say yes and it is going to flash the image so the only thing that you need to do is to wait until it is done it sure has not now finished burning the image to my micro sd card so i can remove it and here it is and we're going to insert it into my little raspberry pi device here now this device i built it up from a raspberry pi kit so you likely bought one as well and depending on your kit the instructions to assemble it could be different i made sure to choose a plastic case to make sure that the wi-fi network generated by our stellar mate os is actually has a long range and uh the instructions within my kit were super clear on how to assemble everything it was uh sticking a few heatsinks on some of the chips it was screwing in a little fan and then plugging that fan into two little pins and there was a very nice pin diagram to know which pins to use very easy to do i'm not showing it on camera here because these steps will be different depending on the kit that you have chosen for your raspberry pi the important thing is that we have the usb ports uh here and we have a usb c port on this side as well and this is what is going to power the raspberry pi and on the bottom side of things i have the s micro sd card reader so i am going to insert my micro sd card into the micro sd card reader and the orientation is somewhat smart it is with the little sd card bump uh facing towards me when i want to remove the card using my fingernails with that we are going to do the first boot of stellar mate and to do so your kit probably came with a usb c power adapter to simply power the stellar mate if you don't have one feel free to use the mobile battery that you will need for this build anyway for me it's a fast charging mobile battery so that i know it has enough power to uh properly power the raspberry pi i just plug it in i can hear the fence being spinning this is how you turn it on there's no switch um and to turn it off you just unplug it so it's as simple as that and it's really cool to know that there is a whole little computer in here that actually works as a computer and actually the steps that i'm going to show moving forward is i'll start by doing things on a computer even though they can be done from uh the stellar mate application for ios and android the reason is that at first the app can have connectivity issues until we update the um stellar mate os inside so we're gonna do that from my pc or from any browsers within any os and uh once i plugged in we'll need to wait around five minutes for the first boot because it does a lot of things for that very first boot and once those five minutes are elapsed we should have access to a wi-fi network called stellar mates that we should be able to detect from the pc so let's wait for those few minutes okay and now when i look at the windows wi-fi i can see the stellar mate a wi-fi hotspot is there which means that i can connect to our device wirelessly i'll select it and just click on connect it's going to ask me for a pin we don't want to use that we want to click on connect using the security key instead and the password is stellar at mate so let me show you that stellar admate we're going to click next um yes or no here depending on how you want for security what you want for security it's going to get stuck on checking network requirements for a while you can just click somewhere else and click again on the wi-fi networking and you can see that stellarmate is connected with no internet next point is to open our browser so i am in google chrome and i am going to access to uh this address stellarmate.local semicolon column 6080. when i click that i'll have this window coming here i'll click on connect and as the password i'll set s mate s-m-a-t-e and said send credential credentials and now we are on the desktop of that tiny little five volt powered cute computer i love the raspberry pi it's so cool as a geek but anyway uh what we want to do is configure it first to connect to our home wi-fi to do that i'll just go inside the preferences advanced network configuration and i'll click first on the stellar mate wi-fi and i'll click on that little gear here and the first thing that i'll do is that i'll switch it from five gigahertz to 2.4 gigahertz this is because uh in the end our little sky skywatcher mount here will be able to connect to the stellar mate wi-fi but it is not able to do so in 5g there's a second reason for me is that in japan using 5g wi-fi outside the house is forbidden by law so i have to set it to 2.4 g i'm gonna save and i am going to go to the stellar mate menu here click on shutdown and reboot and that should make sure that the wi-fi is now set to 2.4 g then i will be connecting to my home wi-fi after waiting for a couple of minutes we should see the stellar mate network come back so i'll connect to it again and make sure that i am indeed connected and uh what i'll click on the connect button on our browser window uh send the credentials esm8 and i'll go back to our advanced network configuration and in here i'll click the plus button to add a network because just clicking here doesn't give you a list of available wi-fi networks this is because you need to disconnect first you could do that and actually connect this little raspberry pi to a monitor you can do all of this by connecting a keyboard mouse and monitor to this as well there's many ways we're doing this i'm i'm just doing it my way many other ways to do this so just keep it keep that in mind i am going to set the connectivity type to be wi-fi and the ssid i need to choose an ssid that exists i'm going to use yy router which is one of my home ssids we're going to set client automate automatic we're going to leave things as is the only thing we're going to change is in wi-fi security uh you'll put wpa and wpa2 personal this is what your wi-fi is very likely using and then you input your own one wi-fi password i'll also set the device here by the way and yes so we have the wpa settings here ipv4 is automated ipv6 is automated the general looks fine as well so now i'm going to go ahead and click save and what i'm going to do is the easiest way to do so is to simply restart my uh my computer my raspberry pi again and after a couple of minutes have elapsed i can refresh the stellarmate.local column 6080 page and we should be able to connect while i am connected to my home network and as the password i'll put s-m-a-t-e again send and we're back on the desktop except that this time we're connected to my home wi-fi which is great because we can do what i wanted to do and you should have been able to do those steps from the stellarmate app as well if you go to the device tab i'm going it this way again because i want to avoid any connectivity issues that i see with some android devices this is the lowest common denominator that i can find that i am sure will work absolutely all the time so now i actually minimize k-stars and we can see that on the main page of stellar made we have a software updated so i am going to double click on that and we can see that we get stellar mates tools windows with the ability to update so what we're going to do is to click on software updated updater here it's going to check for software updates which it can do because it's now on my home wi-fi that has internet connectivity and then it's actually going to update stellar mate while we are waiting we may want to install two applications for smartphone that we will need those are available for both android and ios we want one application called stellarmates which is going to be used to control our little raspberry pi computer from our smartphone and another application is called simscan pro and since can pro is used to actually control this little mount here but we're actually not going to use it to control the mount we're going to use it to set the mount to connect to the wi-fi hotspot that is generated by the raspberry pi so let's wait for the update to finish if the update times out don't worry too much about it just try again later um if it times out and then tells you there's no further update it's wrong just restart the raspberry pi until you have the latest update and after waiting for a little bit it tells me that the os upgrade is complete and that i can then reboot the unit which is what i am going to do by clicking the reboot button and saying yes now we're just going to wait another couple of minutes i am now on my smartphone it's an old android smartphone and i will check that i am connected to my home network on my home wifi because our stator made device once it's updated and once you've rebooted it it is still connected to your home network so now i'm gonna open up the stellarmate app we're going to give it access to our location and i am going to sign into my account now once this is done we are ready to connect to our device so i am going to click the rescan button here and it's going to immediately detect a stellar mate i'm just going to stop the process because it's already detected on my network i'm going to tap it and it is going to connect to our device once it is done it's going to show an equipment profile like we have here the equipment profile shows that we can go to the device tab and in the device tab we're actually able to switch the network to go back to the original stereomate network so to do that on the top right i will press the gear icon and i'm going to set forget wi-fi so i'm going to click this it's going to warn me that i may not want to forget my wi-fi i'm just going to say that i want to continue click yes and now we're going to wait again a couple of minutes for the stellar mate hotspot to come back and now i see it in my list of networks so i am going to click on stellar mate and it is going to uh to connect hopefully um while we are doing that you may be getting something saying that this network connected connection is limited do you want to stay on that network you need to say yes tap that notification say yes so for example here i have wi-fi has no internet access i'm going to tap on this and i'm going to say don't ask again for this network i want to stay connected yes now that we are connected to the stellar made hotspot i'm going to click ok in the app and the app will automatically reconnect to our stellar mate device we can check the progress under the setup tab on the left i can see that it has detected a new ip address of 10.250.250.1 i'm going to tap that and we can see that immediately i go inside my equipment profiles which is good okay so now connected to the stellar mate i am going to go inside a device again just to have another look at the device configuration and we can see that the wi-fi band is where i is 2.4 gigahertz just like i said it via my computer earlier and you can see that it's very easy to tap on that uh setup icon and change it to five gigahertz as necessary for everything to work so uh that's just to double check now we'll go back to setup to do the necessary setup steps uh to be able to use our fully automated electronic telescope once it's complete i'm first going to go to the equipment profiles and click the plus icon and then here mount i will select azg skywatcher azgti oh there it is azgti out as and ccd i am going to select zwccd because i use a ccd a cmos camera from zw if you use another brand choose whatever is relevant for your device i am going to name the profile demo for uh for this particular demonstration and save it and you can see i have demo selected as my equipment profile the next thing is we want to add a primary telescope so i'm going to click the plus icon again for vendor i'm going to put sky watcher the model will be 50 ed whatever it works not put in there what's important is the aperture which is 50 millimeters for this particular telescope and the focal length i will set it to the correct focal length which is 242 millimeters and then we're going to save that and this is selected as our primary telescope so this is quite important we are going now to keep those parameters and whenever you connect to stellar mates again from the application you'll want to make sure that those profiles are selected otherwise you might run into problems while we're at it make sure to go into the settings tab and set the auto sync location to on so that the location from your smartphone will be communicated effectively to the stellar mate os and it can control the scope correctly based on your time and location you can also in the setup tab use the sync gps option at the at the bottom but i do prefer having it in the settings the next step for us will be to configure the syn scan pro app for this mount to connect to the stellar mate hotspot so let's get that going the first thing i am going to do to set up this little mount to connect to our stellar mate control center effectively is i am going to turn it on what this will do is that the mount will broadcast a wi-fi hotspot that we can connect to just like we did for the stellar mate hotspot and as you can see here we have that syn scan hotspot that's available this is what i will be connecting to now we will launch the simscan pro app that we downloaded earlier i'm going to launch it i am indeed connected to the synthscan network you want to make sure that the app has permission to use your location otherwise you'll have to set the location manually i'm going to click on the connect button and it is going to immediately find and connect this uh little mount which you know from the app directly i can actually control to make it turn or whatever but we're not doing that right now for now i'm gonna go inside the settings and i'm gonna select wi-fi setting here in there we're gonna enable the checkbox for modify station we're going to enable station mode and we're going to put ssid as stellar mate here it is the password will be stellar at mate just like when we connected from the computer r from the phone and we do not want to use dhcp i'm going to put a fixed ip of 10.250.250.20 and this is what we are going to use as settings so now i'm going to click on the apply at the top right of that screen it's going to take a bit of time to apply the settings what it's doing it's actually attempting to connect this little mount to the stellar mate's wi-fi hotspot if it succeeds we'll see when we refresh if it didn't succeed something went wrong either you forgot to set this there mate network to 2 2.4 g or some of the settings you have like the ssid or the password were incorrect let's click on refresh here to see our status and if it was successful we will see the ssid state to stellar mate if the ssid is blank it means that it failed and you need to try again and with that i do not need to use my simscan app anymore from my phone i am now going to connect back to the stellar mate network because now we have the stellar mate here is connected to the asia to the mount and my phone will all need to be on the same network so i'm connecting back to that while i am at it i'm actually going to put some of the finishing touches by putting my mobile battery by uh by forcing it onto the tripod using a velcro a velcro strap and i am going to do the same thing for our little computer i'm mounting the computer itself the raspberry pi on the scope itself it's not looking very pretty that's my weak point uh i'm sure other people could 3d print a nice holder or something really neat like that i i i don't i'm not skilled at that so feel free to attach it in whatever way works best for you um i'm just using velcro velcro straps here uh you could use anything else that works and probably anything is better than what i'm doing but we're really getting the equipment ready and here we are and i'm going to add a finishing touch of connecting my usb cable to the camera usb plug here i'm using a usb 2 cable i should really be using a usb 3 cable but i use what i have we also may want to do some better cable management so that we don't have a cable dangling i i am terrible at a good cable management but here we are this should be good enough so now we have the control center here which is all set up connected to the camera and to the mount over wi-fi from that point on i'll make sure that my phone is always connected to the stellar mate hotspot here and i will launch stellarmate and we're going to stay in stellarmate for a little bit of time now upon launching stellarmate it reconnects to my equipment profiles i want to make sure that i have the telescope and the equipment profile that we set together selected in the uh in the main screen and then i am going to click on the start button next to the equipment profile this will start all of the live imaging and mount control processes that we need now when we do that it's not going to be able to connect to the mount so you'll have a port selector menu that will come up and this port selector we need to input the ip and a port number that's going to connect to the synth scan mount not the ip fortunately we know it's because we said it earlier in the simscan app it is 10.250.250.20 the port number is 11880 so just put 11880 in the port number and make sure that the protocol at the end is set to udp once you have all of that you can press connect all and the mount will be connected now we have both the mount and the camera connected and ready to be controlled so now let's look a bit at how we use stellar mate the first thing that we are going to do is to go in the ecos tab the second tab from the left and in there we are going to set up our auto centering tolerance because this telescope is very smart it's going to you're going to tell it to go to a target it's going to move there and then it's going to take pictures and centers itself on its own to that target without you having to do anything however the mouse that we're using is a bit cheap and it may not be able to auto center very closely so we want to give it some leeway in here so i tap on the top right kind of target icon and we can see there's a preset here i'm going to click the plus button next to the preset we're going to name the preset demo or whatever you want in here and the important part is the accuracy parameter on the right hand side so we are going to put this accuracy to around 270. this will make sure that we can actually center the objects decently even if they aren't going to be sharp tack at the very center of the frame it's going to be good enough for all our use cases um then once this is done we can set leave everything else as default and there is a little floppy disk icon on the top right i'm going to click that and it is now set to demo now each time you launch stellarmate and you you want to double check this as well as the setup that you have for your equipment profiles and your primary telescope because this is important but with this done we are ready by the way this little target tab by tapping and untapping in you you can make it appear and disappear and this is where you are going to be you can check how well the auto centering is doing you may completely ignore that tab if you wish you can also control the telescope using the icons on the top right as well as the camera so if i click on the t icon on the top right we can see we have telescope controls and right now the telescope is part so the little p icon is in green we're going to unpark it there it is the mount is unparked and now we have arrows on the left and right i can use those arrows to move the telescope around as needed now while we're doing that it can be a good idea when you press on the up arrow if you see that the telescope when you press the up arrow is actually pointing downwards instead of upwards well you need to reverse the telescope to unmount it put it with the objective lens facing the other direction and then remount it it's just to be in sync with the mount but you can see we can completely um control the mount here if i click the little p red p icon now it's going to go back to the original position that we had for the mouse when we first started it if you un if you uh tap again the t icon on the top right it's gonna this interface is going to disappear the other interesting interface is the camera icon the camera icon lets you take exposures and also do a live stack so we are going to uh use the gear icon at the bottom right and we can say that we want an exposure for instance let's start with five seconds and when you do live stacking you'll definitely want 20 seconds or more to give time to the live stacking process to actually do all of the required computations and now using the the top right button the camera with a little like wi-fi icon kind of thing it's going to take one exposure right now it's not going to do anything but it can make we can make sure that the camera has indeed been able to take a picture and we can see what we would call a dark frame just a picture with the dust cap on so the camera is definitely working and i can uh just use my normal tablet or smartphone gestures to zoom in and out into that object and i could take exposures one after another by using the double the reversal kind of arrows there and it's just gonna keep taking exposures one after the other and displaying them in here and i can stop that process at any time by using the square button the stop button here there we are we also have a live view with the camera we're not going to use this and i can always like remove the settings by pressing the little gear icon again so all of this is really the gist of how to use the system but let's say on your first night now you want to select a target to view it's very easy you go to the targets tab and in the targets tab you have all sorts of targets that are available and you can just browse through those targets as necessary and you have a little yellow line on each of the targets that tells you like the current time of the day where you are and then a white line that tells you how high above the horizon each target is so you can choose which targets to go to depending on how high it is you can also choose different types of targets in the top right right now we're looking at galaxies but i could be looking at global clusters for instance and then i can i have a choice of globular clusters here i could also search for specific objects in the search bar i could also set a field of view so i can select my camera as a field of view and it's going to set a certain field of view that is going to adapt as it learns more about your camera which it will do automatically if i want to slaughter target i'll just tap one of these objects and do go and solve and that is going to automatically move to your target point to your target and then auto center right now obviously we're not under the stars so it's not going to auto center anything but that's the gist of the system now that it's finished slewing we can actually go to the ecos tab and the target icon to see what it does for the auto centering you can see it took an exposure we're going to click the stop button to stop it and you can do that at any time as well just because we don't want to center right now but with that we've basically completed the setup for our little telescope and we can use it under the stars which is i think really really cool um the last feature that we're going to have a look while we're still in this room is we're going to use the gear icon i'm going to hide the the targeting system as well i'm going to set it to uh 20 seconds just so that we don't overwhelm the little raspberry pi computer on top and we're going to click the live icon here and i'm going to leave the default options you can play with contrast saturation as you like but what will happen is that if you click the play icon it's going to take exposures one after another and then stack them and by stack them we mean it's basically going to accumulate light over each of those exposures until you can see the target better and better and better exactly what telescopes like the ev scope do here we're going to send a message that it didn't manage to stack because obviously there are no stars to uh to do any stacking but this is how you accomplish this at any point we can go and click the stop button to make it stop another little topic before we go i want to be very clear about the order of starting up the control center and the mount and also shutting it down first to shut it down we want to go to devices and there is uh on the bottom left a big orange shut down button we want to use that shutdown button and it's going to ask us if we want to shut down the stellar mate we're going to press shut down and it's going to turn off so after a couple of minutes you can just unplug the stellar mate and it's going to be fine but actually and this is something i forgot before you shut it down you want to turn off the mount so it's turn off the mount first after parking it ideally which i didn't do here and then shut down the stellar mate and then when you want to start things up it's going to be plugging in the stellar mate first and then turning on the mount this is to make sure that the mount once it turns on it can't see the stellar mate hotspot so you plug in the starter mate you wait one minute you turn on the mount then the setup is very easy you want to use the clutch here to make your scope basically level horizontal and then you want to use the other clutch on the other side here to be able to turn it so that this scope was not a little horizontal here here we are that's better so that the scope points north so let's say that here is north and you can just use a cheap compass application on your phone to do that or anything like that just point it roughly north and that's going to be fine then you can turn on the stereomate turn on the mount launch the application and then go to whatever target you like actually before we go into the under the stars there's something very important we need to do which is achieve focus almost at infinity with our telescope otherwise just pointing at stars it can be very frustrating because stars out of focus are simply not visible and you don't know how to focus the way to focus with this telescope is by using a green basically a helical focuser here just like a camera lens so it's a the green band next to the camera and you just turn it in one direction and another now you want to connect to your stellar mate app in here and on your smartphone and i am connected to my smartphone and i am already in the ecos camera tab and in the settings you can see that i put my exposure to 0.001 second and my uh gain to zero from 210 as well as it was before remain remember the default gain because it usually would work well for the normal use under the stars and then we'll we'll set it back to that later now uh i am focused on a very distant the roof of a distant building and i want to focus it so i am going to take one exposure and i can zoom into the image and see that i am mostly in focus and i can try to like move the focuser so i'm really like changing it by multiple turns right now and then taking another exposure and you can see that now i'm no longer in focus at all so i know that i need to go back right and by moving like the focuser like that and then taking an exposure every so often you can get closer and closer to uh perfect focus and now you can see that the roof of that very distant building is not completely in focus it's sharply in focus which means that when i use this under the stars and i point pointed the stars we should see the stars at point of light as point of lights and if they're slightly like round or thick kind of uh kind of circles or discs instead of points of light i'll be able to adjust using this focuser again but at least i am in the ballpark and so it's quite important to do that before night time so that you don't get frustrated looking for the focus searching for the start now while i'm at it i am going to go to my settings and uh set the exposure back to something like one second and my gain back to i think it was 210 i'll put it as 204 as it is in here and this is good enough so uh now i can turn off my um my stellar mate and turn off the mount so first i'll turn off the mount itself and then i am going to go to my device tab and turn off the stellar mate also getting ready tonight although i could absolutely do this once it's dark because that's really easy to do is that i want to level this and and point the scope towards the north so i'll be using the crutches so i already mentioned the crutch that is here that you can tighten and untighten so tighten it before using stellar mate untighten it when you want to move the mount by hand and we have the crutch here as well and you can see my my scope is not quite balanced so i'll actually move this a bit forward so that it doesn't uh go in either direction when i loosen the clutch here so i'm going to first put it very uh horizontal now on the az gti we also have you may not be able to see it but there's a very little like tiny cute uh bubble level here i'm not sure how accurate it is but it works good enough and the the gti is fairly smart and doesn't mind being not quite horizontal then i'll use a compass app a very simple compass app and i'll point the telescope to the north and yeah it seems like the north is roughly in this direction so this is what i am going to be using i don't need to be super precise um it is better if you use the true north so if you use an application that supports true north but really don't sweat over it it's a we'll be able like the the the um raspberry pi will be able to figure that out later during the night when we actually target um when we actually slew to a target so now we are all ready and tonight i'll just have to um turn the stellar mate on turn the mount on connect the smartphone app and then choose the targets and we'll be going to that so let's uh i'll see you once we are under the stars we are now in darkness or at least as dark as it can get here in tokyo under the few stars i can see with the naked eye so what you're about to see is the worst possible case for this particular setup but even then we will see a lot more than what i think you expect with such a cute small and portable setup if tried from anywhere else like american suburbia for instance you'll get much better and much more amazing results than what you're going to see here this is truly a worst case scenario as we have seen earlier in this video the only thing that i did is i plopped my telescope down and i leveled the telescope itself and pointed it roughly towards the north now all i'm going to do is actually plug in the little control center at the top and after roughly one minute i'll just turn on the mount and that will let us use the equipment when are basically ready so the next step for me will be to go into the smartphone app to control everything from my smartphone and take some pictures i am now on my smartphone with a list of targets that i can go to my smartphone connected automatically to the to the my telescope and the brains of the operation i can just choose a target for instance if i want to go to the hercules globally cluster i can just select the target and click go and solve and the telescope will automatically go there and once the telescope is in the vicinity it's actually going to take pictures of the stars and orient itself using those pictures of stars and automatically center the target you can hear it doing it right now it's doing it it's centering the target so that we'll we're sure to get uh the right object in the center of our frame and i got a message that the telescope has finished centering the object so i can move to the echoes tab and i'm gonna bring up the camera tab i'm gonna set an exposure uh maybe yeah let's start with five seconds and we're gonna take one exposure to see what's there now we have that exposure on the phone we can see the global cluster at the middle of the frame but i'm a bit out of focus so what i can do about that is just focus the telescope a bit more normally i would do that at the beginning of the night and this is as good a time as any to do so it's good to start with close enough focus as we did earlier in the video i'll go my i'll get my exposure to just one second and i am going to take one exposure i am zooming in on a specific star here and i'm going to try moving the focuser in one direction and see if it made it made the star uh smaller or bigger it made it bigger in this case so i'll turn the focuser in the other direction instead and take another exposure it's definitely smaller let's keep going in that direction and take another exposure and we go like that until we get stars that are as small as we can get them and once you've done that once it typically works for for the season it can change with temperature to some extent and here we can see i'm starting to see some smaller stars all around so it's really important to be well focused and it's probably the biggest the most difficult part of using a telescope like this but you have the exact same problem with the super expensive ev scope are still in stellina telescopes that do the same thing but just for three times the price for focusing we could also use a focusing aid called a bat enough mask it's something that i may cover in a following video if you guys are interested and please let me know if that's the case in the comment and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss that video okay and now that we've done our focus i'll go maybe two for a longer exposure time of maybe 20 seconds because i want to really see what's there and this is really so cool because i waited 20 seconds and poof what do i see i see the hercules global cluster it's a very small object and it's really difficult when you're not trained for astronomy to really see it as a cluster of stars but here we see it really really well even though we are in tokyo and the light pollution is so horrible here and there's tons of objects that we can see but what i can see do now also is click on that live button and we can try to accumulate light to see the object better and better so i'll just press the play button and we'll see how this looks like when we keep accumulating light over a certain period of time and i've waited just less than five minutes with five minutes of light accumulation we can see the result here on the global cluster it's a very famous cluster it's a very small object normally you need a very big telescope to review it here we're viewing it with some little tiny thing here and we can see the whole characteristic shape of the cluster kind of like that helix around the star cluster itself you have tens of thousands of stars in there and it is mind-boggling that we've just built an automated electronic telescope a smart telescope that can really find that cluster center it and then show it to us in such detail and it's super portable as a rig and the great thing is i don't have to stop here i can choose further and further targets and just as i'm talking we keep getting more and more light accumulated on that cluster so we can see more and more details and i absolutely love this and it's something that we can really build on our own i am going to stop the image accumulation on this particular target but i really love what we got and we can try going to another target as well for example i could try having a look at the dumbbell nebula it's a very famous nebula it's a small object as well normally it's almost you'd only see like some kind of vague shadow of transparent thing in a big telescope from here let's see what we can get with this tiny telescope and this is the very first time i attempt this so again i pressed the go and solve and it's just automatically going there it's going to center my target without me having to do anything and i can see that the centering is complete and let's have a look let's take a let's not do a live exposure let's just take a 20 second exposure and see what we have here can we see anything i don't expect to from tokyo and i'll be super super surprised if i actually see something but having this smart telescope and being able to view those astronomical objects from the city in a way that you wouldn't be able to view them with a big telescope and with why it's there look at that it's not tracking very well but we can see an actual shape in the middle okay i'm gonna try to do a light accumulation on this as well because why not this is super cool now for this particular live stacking i'm using 10 second exposures to limit i saw the tracking had a bit of issues near the zenith but to limit the um the the oblong shapes of the stars and we can see the nebula is getting more and more visible it's we can see the corkscrew shape that which is typical of this nebula we can see that the inside is blue green that is from the oxygen three emissions from the nebula the outside is red from the hydrogen alpha and with my big telescope huge telescope i would not be able to see this but we're able to just on this smartphone with this smart telescope that we built ourselves isn't that super cool okay i think i'll be spending the rest of the evening like looking at various targets because this is just too fun i am loving this i hope you will love this i hope you can enjoy doing this because this is really a cool way of exploring the heavens even from the city even from tokyo without having to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on astrophotography equipment and without any prerequisite knowledge any knowledge of how to assemble everything all of this is comparatively simple overall to assemble as we saw in this video and i really hope that you can enjoy this device as much as i do and with that thank you so much for watching this has been a blast i hope you liked this tutorial and i really hope that some of you will actually try building this rig which is really not a very difficult to build rig and the results that we can get are amazing i can't wait to take this under dark skies not tokyo skies because just from tokyo the amount of detail we can see i think is amazing and yeah anywhere you are in the world you'll get great result out of a small telescope like that if you're interested in astronomy and astrophotography please consider subscribing to this channel i think you won't regret it click that bell icon as well and please please please leave a like on this video to tell the youtube algorithm to to show it to more people because i really think this can be a fun project for a lot of people and the results are absolutely amazing it's so exciting to be able to view the heavens that way so as always thank you so much for watching whenever you can don't forget as we are doing right now to look up at the stars and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Cuiv, The Lazy Geek

Views: 370,920

Keywords: astrophotography, evscope, stellina, evscope equinox, evscope equinox review, evscope telescope review, stellina telescope, stellina telescope review, smart telescope, electronic telescope, EAA, smart astronomy, astronomy from the city, smarphone astronomy, stellarmate, Electronically Assisted Astronomy, deep space astronomy, smartphone telescope, light accumulation, astronomy live stacking, astrophotography with phone, astrobackyard, evscope 2, evscope 2 review, vespera telescope

Id: 0JdtL950RjQ

Length: 57min 13sec (3433 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021