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PLEASE READ THE END OF THE DESCRIPTION SHOULD YOU WANT THIS SENT TO YOU RATHER THAN COLLECTING – BECAUSE OF COVID OR DISTANCE
This is an amazing bundle for an amateur astronomer. At its centre is the Celestron CPC800, motorised/on board computer. As standard you point it at any three objects in the sky at night, tell it the date and time and it triangulates where it is and up pops a list of celestial objects from Jupiter to distant galaxies which you can choose and it will ‘goto’ the object and then track it across the sky. I’ve enhanced this considerably with the addition of a wifi module which lets you control the whole rig remotely on a phone app or your PC or MAC, and in addition I purchased Celestron StarSense which replaces the standard spotter scope with a digitised camera which automatically identifies its location by taking photos of the sky and triangulating. So essentially power up, tell StarSense to go and a couple of minutes later you’re up and running.
I chose this as the biggest steadiest scope I could buy and still transport should I wish to leave town and go to darker locations. The scope straps into a car seat and gets seatbelted in, and the extremely sturdy mount folds. For anyone not familiar with Astronomy, a sturdy mount is vital, because as you can imagine, a fragile or unstable mount makes it very hard to maintain the view of an bject several hundred light years away. To further aid mobility I’m including two powertanks. They are portable batteries to power the scope, but also contain torches. Again for anyone unfamiliar with astronomy, white light is your enemy – normally at night you wait a while for your eyes to adjust to sky and improve your visibility. Not much good if you’re off to the sea for a night viewing so these come with red light filters to allow you to find a spot without impacting your visibility.
There are a selection of eyepieces. For those unfamiliar, the Barlow is a good quality Televue which doubles the size of the image in whichever other eyepiece you choose – great when looking at the rings of Saturn or Spot on Jupiter. The 40mm 42 degree gives you a lovely wide view of the sky – and is often referred to as a SpaceWalk eyepiece.
To make this truly complete I’ve purchased a mains power supply so that when in my back yard it can stay connected and powered up well beyond what a battery pack allows, and I also purchased a specific Philips Webcam with an adaptor that replaces an eyepiece and allows you to take video (for example of the moon’s surface or when tracking the Space Station) or take a series of frames over a period of time to bring out the detail and the colour of deep space objects. Those lovely colour photos you see of distant nebulae are not what the naked eye sees but a collection of photos combined.
So there we have it. I have calculated what this all costs new, and what these items sell for on ebay and through other classifieds, and I believe that at full retail they’re around 3,500, and used you’d still be looking at upto 2,700
Finally I’m listing this as collection only, however if you want this and live far away consider a man and van service. I reserve the right to pull the item from eBay if there are no bids, and sell elsewhere. So if you’re watching and intending to bid last minute or send me an offer last minute, best you get in early as if I cancel – that will be it.
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Category: Cameras and Photography:Telescopes and Binoculars:Telescopes
Location: Sittingbourne