DETAILS
Cost: £379.95 / $469.95 From: Celestron Aperture: 4” Focal length: 25”
The night sky is full of interesting objects that even a small telescope can show in detail,but actually finding them has always been a problem for beginners. The advent of computerised star catalogues loaded into telescope handsets made it possible to align a telescope on the sky by pointing it at just three bright stars. Once done, the handset could direct the telescope to any other object in its database, but it needed position encoders on its axes. And all this requires some user input – the date and time, the location and choosing the stars.
Then along came ‘plate solving’ – the software to identify a field of view of stars in a photograph – and the great computing power, position sensing and imaging capabilities of a modern smartphone. Celestron’s magic solution has been to link these to a telescope, doing away with the need for the costly handset, the user input and the encoders. Its StarSense technology links a smartphone to a telescope in a simple
