CELESTRON STARSENSE EXPLORER DX 102AZ

Innovative technology provides the simplest and quickest solution yet to finding objects to observe, and this instrument will be very popular with beginners

- Robin Scagell

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 but robust fashion.

There are four instruments in the Celestron StarSense Explorer range: an 80mm refractor, a 114mm reflector, the 102mm refractor under test and a 130mm reflector. All of these instruments are standard members of the Celestron range and are available in other mounting packages. In this range, the 80mm refractor and 114mm reflector are supplied on lighter weight mountings, while the 102mm refractor and 130mm reflector have the same heavier mounting. Because these mountings use a standard Vixentype or CG-5 dovetail attachment, you can attach any other instrument that uses the same dovetail, taking into account the load capacity of the mounting.