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| I just watched a YouTube video review of the Celestron Starsense Autoguider (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhOBMovNaZI&t=852s), which appears to show accurate guiding of a Celestron 11" SCT with an external guiding system. How can this be? I think many of us believe, often from personal experience, that the only way to guide an SCT is with an off-axis guider, which is often a challenge to use. Has Celestron discovered a "special sauce" that makes using a separate guide scope work? The new guider has a focal length of 120mm and a built-in monochrome sensor. Unfortunately, it only works with Celestron mounts, but if Celestron can make their new guider work, maybe others can do the same. Does anyone have any insights into this new guider. Cost is currently, $799. |
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I never used that product. The main issues with guiding an SCT at long focal lengths is differential flexure and mirror flop. They may have solved the flexure issue with what looks like a very solidly mounted guidescope. Mirror flop maybe negated on EdgeHd systems with mirror locks. For me with a standard C11 without mirror locks, mirror flop maybe a bigger issue that I can't see being fixed by this guider. Like all things Celestron, it seems to be overpriced and locked to their ecosystem. An OAG-L with the best guide camera available (the 174mm mini) is still significantly cheaper ($600 vs $800), and can be used with any mount or setup, not just Celestron mounts. I honestly find using an OAG-L is much less challenging. My imaging train (2600mm pro, 36mm ZWO EFW and OAG-L/174mm mini) is all in one unit all bolted together that works for all my scopes. I just move it from one OTA to another as a unit. I set it up once and never worried about it after that. Rarely do I refocus my guide camera when I bump it while detaching my imaging train, but for most nights I don't even need to do that. Haven't worried about mounting a guidescope for a long time. |
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I have a CPC1100 HD for visual, DSO, and planetary imaging. For DSO, I use Hyperstar. I bought the StarSense Autoguider because it's self contained, can be operated from the hand controller, and replaced the StarSense Autoalign I've been using. The specs show that the autoguider has an ARM computer built in, so no specialized hand controller is needed. For visual use, it's what autoalign should have been. It conducts a quick alignment and uses plate solving to center targets in the FOV. For some reason, they're always slightly to the right of center, but this could be my backlash settings. I've also struggled with it placing planets or the moon in the FOV, since it doesn't appear to plate solve on solar system objects and the pointing model isn't updated by each plate solve. Regardless, once centered on a target, I can enable guiding and it doesn't move in the eyepiece. For imaging, there's a lot of potential that's currently unusable. I set up my rig on the wedge, fire up my mini-pc, and start CPWI. Aiming the scope about 30° E of the meridian, I start the polar alignment sweep of at least 50°. It quickly conducts a series of plate solves at different RA's along the celestial equator, then offers PA instructions. With the autoguider calibrated as best I can, it's within 5 arcmin of the solution NINA's 3 point polar alignment says it should be. This is good enough for me, and much faster than NINA. It then goes into a 4 point alignment that should be familiar to anyone who has used Starsense Autoalign, sending data to my mini-pc for processing. Usually, within a few minutes it's done. Unfortunately, with the current version of CPWI (2.5.2) the menu to enable the PHD server doesn't exist, so it's not useful as a guide scope for imaging yet. Celestron promises this feature is coming. Since it's a new product, there's bugs. I have pretty much every AUX device that Celestron makes, and they don't all play well in the sandbox. I have to unplug one to make the rest work. For imaging, if I leave out the hand controller, the rest work. Visually, if I leave out the 4x dew heater/power controller, the rest work. Celestron currently has my gear and is troubleshooting to see if they can come up with a solution. |
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I bought one last week. For bad seeing conditions I could make some short test with an RASA 8 and Asi ZWO 2600MC on an CGX Mount. Installation no problem. 120 sec pictures were made very fast from starting the equipment only with an roughly made polar Alignment . It started within 5 Minutes with guiding under bad conditions. For me it was much faster than with PHD2 and also in comparison to the Star Aid autoguider . I was very surprised about the quality of guiding and the automatic centering of the target. I could make for weather conditions only two 120 sec. series with about 5-10 Pictures each. I will use it as fast as possible also with an edge HD 8 on CGX and also on a AVX mount. Clear skies |
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I just received mine, and I gave it a first try yesterday on my 6’’ NexStar Evo with the default Alt/Az mount. I’m more interested in the guiding capabilities than the auto-align features, especially since aligning an Alt/Az is very easy. That being said, I also have a wedge for my NexStar, so I’m looking forward to trying the SSAG with it. It could help with the alignment here, possibly even removing the need for a polar alignment if I’m reading the documentation right. So, I did the initial setup and tried the first alignment and center calibration. So far, I haven’t been able to align correctly. I first tried a manual alignment, as my setup is on my balcony, and only the south portion of the sky is visible. It failed. Then, I tried the fully automatic alignment, and it succeeded. But when I then pointed at Jupiter, it was pretty off, so I couldn’t finish the initial calibration. The conditions were not so good yesterday, and it wouldn’t be fun if it worked the first time, right? I’ll keep trying, as I like the idea of this device. I heard that the first firmware versions are still very buggy and that many issues will be addressed in future revisions. But the SSAG has a great potential for me. I’ll post any follow-up. Clear skies! |
