Wifi / and star sense

[A_Lawrence (Amelia)]

Anyone have any experience in using the wifi for celestron ? Good bad ? Considering to getting it as it may be easier for me to use the iPad with the skyportal app to find my stars ect in saying that I know I will still have to align but would it be worth getting star sense as well or just the wifi? Will this make it easier controlling and finding my stars on my new scope? Again let me clarify I have a HD edge on an AVX mount - the mount is not something I'm used to in a sense I've been using a nexstar 4se up until now. Although with practice I'm sure I'll get there in the end. And how the hand control in aligning is much different compare to ,y nexstar for example all I had to do was align it to any 3 bright stars on my nexstar but on the AVX mount I have to find the stars and align it as listed in the hand controller......

Please no negative comments 👍

[casstony]

Hi Amelia, the AVX is easy to use once you become familiar with it. Starting from basics:

Use a compass to find South and roughly line up the RA axis. Then you can do the Auto Two Star alignment. A planisphere is all you need to be able to find the brightest stars.

Once you're familiar with basic setup, alignment and go-to functions of the mount you can move on to learning the All Star Polar Alignment as outlined in the manual.
ASPA only takes a minute or two once you've learned how to do it: after aligning the mount, select ALIGN, then POLAR ALIGN then follow the prompts. You point the mount/scope at a known star then the mount moves away from the star, then you move the star back into the eyepiece using the mechanical adjustments on the mount. Now you're polar aligned and you need to do another basic alignment (because the mount was moved).

Once you've become proficient with that you can consider buying a StarSense which largely automates the alignment process. You still need to do the ASPA though.
ASPA is only needed for imaging or if you particularly want the mount to track objects visually for long periods without adjustments. Go-To's work just fine without precise polar alignment.

You do need to lock the axes very firmly on the AVX and have the scope reasonably balanced to make sure that there won't be any slipping on either axis.

I started imaging last winter with my AVX with StarSense and a short focal length refractor and it's been quite easy to achieve good tracking (with an MGEN autoguider). You can start off taking 30 sec exposures and move to guiding in the future.

Take everything one step at a time to avoid becoming discouraged.

[A_Lawrence (Amelia)]

Thank you! Yeah lately we haven't had good skies but I'm hoping this weekend I can do a proper play around and align it all I was hoping that I just needed more time to practice with it - i do use my scopes for imaging thank you for you help 👍

[sil (Steve)]

I have both the celestron skyprodigy 6 (the built in sky sense scope) and an older Skyfi device. Never been able to get my iphone or ipad to talk to it though I can connect the wifi fine but skysafari can't connect.

I didnt buy these intending to connect them, i got the skyfi long ago intending to use on something else but didnt have a cable on hand to connect to handset, then later got prodigy (the only scope I have that i can use now). anyway, don't know where the problem lies (not a concern for me either but last time i tried I triple checked all instructions, did all updates etc and have all the correct cables now etc, maybe the sky prodigy handset lacks a few features since built in sky sense negates need for computer control? Anyway point is it should have worked I'd have thought but not in reality. handset updates dont seem to be available to the prodigy scopes and its never mentioned in change logs for skysense or regular celestron handsets.