If you own a telescope, it was probably easy enough finding the “blood moon” a couple of days ago. It was that giant red thing in the sky, right where the normal moon usually is. But if you’re just casually looking into space, all those planets and constellations can be much harder to identify.
Celestron’s NexStar Evolution has an ingenious solution to figuring out just what, exactly, you’re looking at in the night sky. The Wi-Fi-enabled lineup of Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes -- there are 6-inch (1500mm/F10), 8-inch (2032mm/F10), and 9.25-inch (2350mm/F10) versions -- show up as an access point in a smartphone or tablet’s list of available networks. Connecting to the telescope to a mobile device lets you control it by tapping areas on a star-map app. Simply choose a celestial body and the telescope’s motorized mount and fork arm automatically position the scope.
To pair the telescope with the app, all you have to do is point it at three bright objects in the sky. Using the mobile device's GPS coordinates, the date, and the time of day, the “SkyAlign” configuration system is able to figure out what it’s looking at and react accurately to your app-controlled maneuvers. The robotic arm on the telescope is powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that gets up to 10 hours of robo-adjusting per charge. The USB-rechargeable battery also lets you sip a charge off it to your smartphone.
The demo I saw used the Cosmos Celestron Navigator app on an iPad, which was built for the company’s first amateur-level Wi-Fi telescope announced earlier this year: the Cosmos-branded 90GT Wi-Fi Telescope. That one’s a cheaper and longer refractor telescope with 910mm/F10 optics, but the Cosmos app built for it works with the NexStar Evolution series, too. There’s an even more robust app built for the NexStar Evolution -- it’ll have an even beefier database of celestial objects to explore -- timed in conjunction for the Evolution series’ availability in May.
The bigger the ‘scope, the bigger the price. Celestron’s 6-inch model will go for $1,200, the 8-inch model will go for $1,600, and the 9.25-inch telescope will cost $2,100.
