Celestron – StarSense AutoAlign Telescope Accessory – Automatically Aligns GoTo Telescope in 3 Minutes – Compatible with Celestron Computerized Telescopes – Advanced Mount Modeling

I apologize for the length of this review, but I thought the details might be helpful for folks interested in this awesome little gadget.My Celestron StarSense arrived last week, and I’ve had a couple of chances to try it out. I’ve used the device exactly twice, but I think my experience may provide some useful information to others who are thinking of purchasing this device.My focus is on astrophotography and my rig is 100% portable on a tripod, so alignment is a frequent chore. I held off buying the device because I had read that it had severe issues integrating with Celestron’s native polar alignment process, ASPA (All-Star Polar Alignment). Once those issues were corrected by Celestron and I read a positive review of the device in Sky and Telescope, I went ahead and bought it. So far, I’m very glad I did.After unboxing, I immediately updated the firmware on the StarSense camera and the included hand controller. Be sure to do this – as I mentioned, Celestron fixed some major problems with the software since the release of the device, and you’ll want to be sure to capture these. Be sure you have the appropriate cables and adapters ready for this.Once the firmware was updated, I attached the SS camera to my scope. I have a non-Celestron OTA, but a Celestron Advanced VX mount. This was one point of annoyance with Celestron. They provide two mounting methods – a super-solid one for Celestron OTAs, and a not-so solid one for everyone else. I was mounting to a dovetail plate, and it was annoying that I couldn’t use the more solid method just because Celestron had made the mounting holes too narrow. If they had just provided a couple of holes at the standard mounting sizes they could have given folks a lot more options. Left with the secondary mounting method, I was glad I had an extra mounting base available, because Celestron doesn’t provide one with the unit (they assume you’re replacing your finderscope with the SS camera). I sacrificed my mounted laser pointer in favor of the SS camera and continued. If you have a single finder\guider and no other mounting base available when the unit arrives, you’ll be waiting for Amazon to deliver before you can use the unit.After setting up outside and doing a rough polar alignment with a polar scope, I turned on the mount with the new HC and SS camera attached. The first thing the HC does is search for the SS camera, which it found with no problem.At startup, the HC gets a little “bossy” – there doesn’t seem to be a way to start up without going through the SSA (StarSense AutoAlign) process before doing anything else. I’m used to entering the Date\Time and location, but that didn’t seem to be an option at startup. You can press the Menu button to add those details, but I didn't know that at the time.I let the SSA do its thing, and it slewed to four different sections of the sky. I was in my side yard, where the house and trees block much of the horizon, and light pollution is fairly severe. I had also neglected to turn a bright flood light attached to my roof off, just to keep things interesting. I started quite early, and I could only see 5-10 stars visually. I noticed that the HC was reporting that it was finding dozens of stars in areas of the sky where I still couldn’t see any.After a couple of minutes, the SSA wrapped up and reported success. At this point, I was 90% certain that the device hadn’t actually done anything – it was just a little too quick and easy. I told the HC to find Albireo. There it was – off center, but within the FOV of my 20mm eyepiece. Not bad. I told it to find Antares in the south. There it was. Whoa.At this point, Celestron has you resolve the error between the SS camera and your telescope by performing a centering procedure. This is done in the HC’s software and doesn’t involve adjusting the camera physically, which was a relief – I think I’ve had enough “dance of the thumbscrews” for one lifetime. The HC has a process for this that involves centering the star in your eyepiece and then confirming that it is centered with the HC. This was simple enough, but the (printed) instruction manual actually has a mistake in it about the steps in the process. It's a good idea to just download the (corrected) online manual if you buy this device.After the centering procedure, the HC tells you that you will need to repeat the SSA process. At this point it was a little unclear whether it expected me to simply run the process again or actually reset my mount to the alignment marks and start over. Thankfully, the former seemed to work just fine.Now, I had done all of this before entering the date, time or my current location. It seemed wrong to move on to polar alignment without entering that data, but then again – does the HC need to know the time or location if it knows the positions of all of the stars, especially if you’re not targeting solar system objects? The HC certainly didn’t seem concerned about it – I had to go menu surfing to even find where to enter the date\time\location – I was never prompted for the information. I went ahead and entered the info and the HC told me to perform SSA again, which I did.The polar alignment process was simple. ASPA normally has two steps – the first where you center a star using the direction buttons on the HC, then the second when you’re asked to center the same star using the mount’s ALT and AZ alignment knobs. With SSA, the first step is done automatically and the user is left with the ALT and AZ adjustments.After the centering\calibration process and ASPA, any stars or objects I selected were perfectly centered in the reticle eyepiece. I spent some time selecting objects near the four points of the compass and just being amazed when they all came up dead center. I started guiding and did some test shots using the CCD – I had perfect pinpoint stars for 12 minute exposures. That night I took 14 12-minute exposures of the Pelican Nebula and had some of the sharpest, roundest stars I’ve ever imaged. Long story short - ASPA was very easy and very accurate.On the second night out, I was just doing a rough alignment so I could take pictures of the moon with my bigger scope. I simply took the device off my refractor and put it onto my SCT, put the OTA on the mount, hooked it up, turned it on and let it align. I started even earlier that night, with only a few stars visible to these middle-aged eyes. No re-centering or fine-tuning, no entry of date or location, no polar alignment. A couple of minutes later, the SSA was done and the GOTO put the moon in the FOV of my 20mm eyepiece on the first try – this is with a 10” SCT – the FOV was less than a moon-width. I also tried several stars and they were all close to center, despite a different OTA and not performing a new centering\calibration procedure.The bottom line: this device exceeded expectations on its first two nights out. I’d say if you have a portable setup this is a no-brainer purchase.Pros: Easy setup (other than the firmware update); easier telescope alignment; simplified ASPA; more accurate polar alignment (at least in my experience). Works in twilight, so you can start your alignment earlier. Works despite trees and\or buildings obstructing large parts of the sky. Fast.Cons: Mounting brackets aren’t all that they could be (see above). Finder mount base not included. New HC has small-print display by default – can be hard to read especially from a distance.

BOTTOME LINE: buy this thing now!Full Review:My first attempt using this was a disaster. was ready to return the product. The manual is well out of date (lists the Hand controller with a phone jack port, its actually a usb mini which is awesome, and many other examples). I bout this for astrophotography for my celestron AVX and CGEM mounts. I have an edgeHD 8 OTA, and a 4.25in stellavue triplet apo. I followed hte instructions as best I could accounting for it being well out of date, as there have been many firm ware upgrades since the instructions were writing, and it needs a massive update. The most critical error is the first few lints of the instructions says to not bother leveling the mount. This will be prove to be my undoing.First night I went exactly by the directions in the book, and this thing was so inaccurate I was enraged. Stayed up to 3am on a work night as I couldn't let it go, power cycling and re aligning, adding 10 ref points to the 4 points it takes automatically, and this thing was 100s of arc minutes off. It was bad. My first concern was the steps listed in the manual did not automatically occur as it was listed. For instance there option to set the date and time, location, etc did not pop up, luckily I have experience with the mounts already and knew how to jump through menus and make these adjustments, but Im on the east coast and it defaults to California. But its worth the trouble to have the usb interface on the HC.The most egregious error was the instructions state you do not have to level the scope. You dont have to polar align the scope (this is true). Night # 2 I decide to give it one more go before sending this thing back, and OHHH am I glad I did. I decided to use my normal setup routine for when I use the 2+4 manual alignment procedure, so I levels the scope ( use use a 10" 3$ level from harbor freight) which only takes like 2 minutes of extra time adusting the tripod leg lengths, I did a cursory polar alignment with my polar alignment scope, wasnt dark so this was not very accurate, I made sure date and time were correct and they were, turn on the mount, it takes about 20 secs for it to give me the message that the mount has synced with the camera, it says press align to start the alignment, so I do. I sit back and it about 90-120 secs, it slews on its on to 4 areas of they sky, stopping for 15-30 secs on each to take a pic, of course you dont see this pic, but the HC LED display keeps you constantly updated on what its doing, including the % complete while its calculating the stars it discovered to its database, and how many stars it sees in each frame. If the scope points towards something blocking the sky, such as my house, it quickly identifies this and moves to a new area. After the initial automated process, it suggests for astrophotography purposes, but I decided to slew to Virgo just to see how accurate this was, and BAM, damn near top dead center.U use backyard EOS and a canon T5i, and in the frame and focus panel of BYEOS, this thing was just at tiny bit off center, I dont know the arc secs or arc minutes, but it was about 4 widths of the star virgo on the screen. THis was darn near as accurate as my manual aligment process. Slew to orion nebula. WIth my scope and the focal reducer, with teh T5i, orion takes up 1/2 the field of view on the photo, its a little off center, i set the motor to speed of 3, move a bit, snap a pic, now I know what directions to go, move the other way a few times while snapping pics, and boom its now dead center. I took 60 second exposures, oh head theres drift, so I polar align, then let it manually re-align, I slew to orion, was a litte off, move away from orion and added a ref point, moved to the other side of orion, new ref pt, did this 4 total times (took like 2 mins), and autoslew back to Orion and BAM, it was perfect. I actually moved the scope just to take it off center for visual asthetics. 60 sec exposures, no problem with the alignment, but i live in Athens GA, and the light pollution is so bad I had to cut back to 45 sec exposures.To review: Once the scope is leveled and balanced, i fire this thing up, 20 sec wait for software to load, I click one button, sit back and drink a beer until the scope stops moving (~ 2 mins), I move to the object I want to photograph, I then add 3-4 extra ref points, slew back to that object and then use the star to polar align. The polar alignment takes just about 2 mins for me to adjust the scope with manual knobs to get the star in the cross hairs. Now I auto align again (2 mins), move to a target, add 4 ref pts (2 mins), and off I freakin go. What just a few nights ago took me literally 1 hour, and this hour mind you was spent laying ont eh cold ground on my back siting starts, torquing my neck, crawling on my hands and knees to visually get these starts in my view finder to to the alignment manually... now the whole damn shabang takes 15 mins, and I do it from the comfort of a chair w/o having to put down my beer. I have used the scope every night, as I dont have to worry about the 30 min scope setup time and the 1 hour alignment, polar alignment, and realignment jsut to be killed by clouds taking out the sky and negating my efforts. The times this saves me allows me to photograph on work nights and be in bed by 11pm, to get up before work and get a few shots of an item in the wrong season, I could not be more thrilled. If this is compatible with your mount BUY IT NOW.Heres the pic: