Australian Sky & Telescope — July 2017

AS&T TEST REPORT by Rod Mollise

66 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE July 2017

What We Like

Excellent optics

Robust Wi-Fi interface

What We Didn’t Like

Confusing manual

Less stable than double-armed

fork mounts

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.

WHETHER I’M SURFING Facebook or

just talking to friends, my smartphone

and I are inseparable — that is, until it’s

time to use a telescope. There are ways

to use an iPhone or Android device to

send a computerised telescope to sky

objects, but until recently add-on cables

and boxes were required. That’s changed

with the introduction of Celestron’s

NexStar Evolution series of Schmidt-

Cassegrain telescopes.

Fork-mounted SCTs have long been

a mainstay in the amateur market,

offering portability and generous

aperture in a compact package. One of

the big attractions of mass-produced

Schmidt-Cassegrains is that they tend

to be in the forefront of technological

advances, and that is certainly true

of Celestron’s Evolution line of SCTs.

This new series fully integrates the

company’s computerised Go To

telescopes with the electronic devices

most everybody owns these days. The

next step in the ‘evolution’ of the SCT?

We looked at the Evolution 9.25 to see.

Celestron NexStar

Evolution 9.25

U.S. Price: $2,199

celestron.com

WThe Celestron NexStar Evolution series

of Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes provides

generous aperture in a compact package, with

fully integrated smart device control.

Smart astronomy:

the NexStar Evolution 9.25

Celestron changes the game with complete Wi-Fi controls.