Australian Sky & Telescope — July 2017

68 AUSTRALIAN SKY & TELESCOPE July 2017

AS&T TEST REPORT

the optional equatorial wedge, which

changes this ‘zone of avoidance’ to the

area surrounding the celestial pole.

Ready to go, I prepared myself for an

adventure in wireless Wi-Fi telescope

control. I installed Celestron’s free

SkyPortal app, which is based on the

popular SkySafari app, for my iPhone

as well as my Android tablet. While

SkyPortal only includes a couple of

hundred deep sky objects, the Plus and

Pro versions of SkySafari are compatible

with the Evolution and include tens of

thousands of objects in their databases.

I initially tested the Evolution

with my iPhone, though results were

identical with my Android tablet. The

process of getting aligned and going

to targets is amazingly simple. Turn

on the telescope and connect to it in

the Wi-Fi setup of the smart device

(it will show up as ‘SkyLink-E5’ in the

list of available networks). A pulsing

Wi-Fi LED indicator shows the scope is

communicating with your smart device.

Once in SkyPortal, click on the

telescope icon. To perform a Go To

alignment, select ‘connect and align’ on

the screen and follow the instructions,

which will lead you through Celestron’s

SkyAlign procedure. The Evo gets the

time, date and location automatically

from your phone or tablet.

SkyAlign requires you to centre three

bright objects, either stars or planets.

You don’t have to know the names of

these objects; you only need to centre

them. I thought I’d have a hard time

using my iPhone’s touch-screen instead

of real buttons on a hand control, but

it was doable from the beginning and

became easy with experience.

The app’s virtual buttons are

very responsive; there is no time-lag

between pushing one and the telescope

beginning to move. I did find the initial

rough-centring speed to be a little too

fast, but a speed-slider onscreen allows

you to adjust that and the eyepiece-

centring speed to suit your comfort.

I lined up the first star through the

red-dot finder, pressed the onscreen

‘Enter’ button, and then positioned the

star through the eyepiece and pressed

‘Align’. I followed that with another

star, then Saturn, and I was done.

The app said my alignment was

successful, and it was. Any object I asked

the telescope to point to, from one

side of the sky to the other, was visible

through the 40-mm eyepiece at 59×, and

sometimes through the 13-mm at 180×.

The Evolution can also be aligned

with the hand control, which includes

several alignment options not available

in SkyPortal. Performing the alignment

with my phone or tablet seemed to

produce the most accurate pointing. The

scope can be operated with either Wi-Fi

or with the hand control, though both

cannot be used at the same time.

So how do you point to objects with

SkyPortal? You can select a target by

clicking on it in the displayed star chart

and then clicking the Go To button, or

you can use SkyPortal’s versatile search

function to find an object of interest

and then tap Go To. There’s also a list

SLike most Celestron NexStar telescopes, the 9.25 is attached to the fork arm via a convenient

Vixen-style dovetail system that enables users to remove or re-balance the OTA, though attaching

the tube can be challenging due to the dovetail’s position on the side of the tube.