http://www.skyandtelescope.com.au 69bricks with a few pieces of tape on the
driveway. On subsequent nights it took
only a few minutes to roll the scope
out of the garage and have it ready for
observing. This may sound stupid, but
because I didn’t have to disassemble the
scope to transport and store it, it was as
easy to use on my driveway as any grab-
and-go scope I’ve tested.
By the second night I’d also gone
through the SynScan manual and had
a better handle on the best way to do
star alignments and, in general, use the
drive’s features. The hand control has
the typical catalogues of objects that are
available with modern Go To systems,
including the Caldwell catalogue. There
is, however, no listing of named deep
sky objects, so if you’re looking for
the Ring Nebula, you’ll have to find
it by either its Messier number (M57)
or its designation in the New General
Catalogue (NGC 6720).
From an operational standpoint, the
drive worked very well. When slewing
the telescope at the higher speeds,
there’s a somewhat annoying lag in the
response to pressing the slew buttons,
but this goes away at slower speeds,
making it easy to centre objects through
the finder and telescope eyepiece. Since
the power jack for the motors moves
as the scope turns in azimuth, you
have to be mindful of having enough
slack in the power cord for the scope
to turn. There is a cord-wrap feature
that helps by preventing the scope from
continuously slewing in one direction,
but I never figured out exactly when it
would activate. This is no big deal, but it
can be a bit surprising when you expect
to have the scope slew only a short
distance from one object to the next but
then find the azimuth motion reverse
direction and turn nearly 360° to get
back to the general area where you were
just looking.
There are a few subtle differences
between the SynScan system and
other Go To scopes I’ve used, but
overall I was very pleased with its
operation and features. I’ve not used
a lot of Dobsonian scopes with Go
To pointing, but I found this one to
be very accurate, and the tracking
excellent. Furthermore, you can
disengage the motor clutches on both
axes and move the scope manually to
any part of the sky and reengage the
clutches and resume observing withouthaving to re-initialise the drives. A very
nice feature.Why the rocky start?
With so many positive things going for
the Stargate, you’re probably wondering
why I said earlier that this review
didn’t start off well. The answer can
be summed up in three words — the
instruction manual. Regardless of
what I might intuitively know about
setting up telescopes, for the sake
of a review I always follow the step-
by-step instructions in the manual.
I can’t recall assembly instructions
worse than those for the Stargate. In
addition to easily recognised mistakes
such as referring to the secondary-
mirror assembly as the primary-mirrorW Far left: The two sections forming each of
the scope’s six truss poles have solid, screw-
together connections at their centres. This
keeps the length of the individual pieces very
manageable for transport and storage. Left:
The truss poles it into numbered connections
on the primary- (seen here) and secondary-
mirror assemblies, and lock in place with a
captive clamp and hand lever. As such, no
tools are needed to assemble the optical tube.S Left: The Stargate’s ribbed secondary mirror is made of molded glass to help reduce weight
and speed temperature acclimation. Right: Lightweight plastic covers for the primary and
secondary mirrors help keep the optics protected and dust-free when the scope is not in use.