Last year at Astrofest someone showed me a strange looking telescope. It was a Celestron with a weird looking camera on the side of the mount.
They went on to tell me that it can do a full auto-setup routine and be pointing at something (fully aligned) in under a minute. The camera integrated into the mount detects stars and removes the need to do a manual star alignment. Celestron calls this technology Starsense and the nice thing about the Skyproidgy mount is they integrate the statsense technology straight into the mount which makes for a nice grab n' go setup.
I didn't think much of it at the time as my imaging gear can platesolve and in a more advanced way then this Celestron.
Fast forward to the beginning of this year and I'm packing for a new job in Sydney, looking at my large and heavy imaging setup it becomes clear to me that it wasn't going to be practical to lug all that gear around with me. So I ended up just leaving it with my dad and his telescope gear.
Around the same time the Celestron Skyprodigy pops back into my mind and I decide that would make the perfect lightweight travel scope.
Ok onto the review:
Although he photos show a C6 the original OTA provided was a Celestron Skyprodigy 130. When you but the mount they have two options a SCT C6 or the 130 but the C6 package isn't very common (maybe because it's more expensive)
I got my Skyprodigy off of Gumtree for around $300 for everything (I've seen them cheaper) and the C6 was around another $300 from Gumtree as well.
My theory as to why they are soo cheap is because the phone jack connector for the hand controller usually has bent pins stopping the scope from booting up / functioning. Luckily it's a pretty easy fix with some tweezers.
After playing around with the mount for about 5 months I gotta say the auto-align ability works pretty well. A concern people had is that it wouldn't work well in light polluted areas or if there was a street lamp or other bright object nearby. Personally I haven't had any of these issues but I'm also running the newest firmware so that might have something to do with it.
In my experience if you can see enough stars with the naked eye than it'll star align fine. On the other hand if you don't have any/enough bright stars visible (for example a building blocking an alignment star) than the auto-align might fail. But to be fair it would be pretty hard to manual align under those circumstances as well.
The other concern a lot of people had was the flimsy-ness of the scope and how much weight it could take. A lot of people found it hard to believe that it would take a C6.
The stock tripod is pretty bad (really flimsy) I used it with the C6 and it worked but you just want to keep the legs collapsed to give it enough stability. After replacing the tripod legs with wooden legs (once again sourced from Gumtree) the telescope became a real joy to use and was very stable for the C6.
I would say you might be able to get away with the stock tripod for a small refractor but not gonna feel nice to use with much more eight.
I usually run my C6 at very high magnifications especially when the seeing conditions are good and if it's windy it does make it a little hard to observe as the C6 catches wind. But considering the magnifications the whole system is pretty solid.
For power I use a 6,600mAh Laptop Power Bank from jaycar mounted on the OTA allowing me to disable cordwrap.
The handcontroller works alright but for some reason it makes me enter the time on every use - I wish they had of used a real time clock with a battery or something to prevent needing this. There is actually a battery located on the pcb but it doesn't seem to be for the time.
The other issue is cordwrap seems to reable itself sometimes randomly.
Oh and one more note, there is actually a difference between the Skyprodigy C6 and a normal C6, there is a 180° difference in potions of the dovetail bar meaning that the focuser sits pointing up instead of down which could potentially block the diagonal for some users.
Pros:
* Fast setup
* No manual alignment
* Not excessively heavy
Cons:
*Controller jack prone to damage
*Flimsy tripod
*Hard to but the mount only brand new
* Time requires setting on every use (most telescope do)
Conclusion:
Overall it's a good scope and I'd recommend it for a beginner just be mindful of the dodgy handcontroller connectors if buying used.
