iOptron SmartStar Goto AltAz Mount: First Impressions

I’ve had my new mount for a little while now and I thought I’d pass on a few comments about what I think of it so far.

I’ve already described the condition of the box when I received it, and that it did not come with the AC adapter, but the iOptron guys sent it the next week along with an apology that it wasn’t shipped with the mount.

I purchased this primarily as a convenient and portable mount to guide my Coronado PST during the day. This mount requires that you use a Vixen-style dovetail mounting plate and I don’t have one of those yet.

In the meantime, my PST is mounted with one of those generic dovetail plates you get with standard camera tripods. Because of this, my setup was a little wobblier than it would otherwise be. I need to order a generic plate like this to mount the PST more securely.

I haven’t really used it yet for looking at the stars or planets since I don’t own a telescope small enough to mount on it, all of my refractors are a bit too large. This’ll be a solar mount for the time being. The specs claim that you can mount a telescope weighing up to seven pounds.

The punchline is that for $200.00, and for tracking the Sun, I’m pretty happy with what this little guy can do. The tripod legs seem a little shaky but I expected that in this price range.

Eventually I plan to attach the AltAz head to a small 4×4 post dug in the ground so the tripod wobbliness isn’t all that big a deal to me.

Setting it up was pretty easy, just level the tripod (there is a small bubble level), turn it on, enter the correct time and observing location in the handpaddle, and it’s ready to go. The website mentions an optional GPS unit that’ll be available soon to make this part of the setup even easier.

After this, you need to perform a one or two star alignment to get the mount oriented.

What isn’t clear to me, and I couldn’t find in the manual, is what the ‘park’ position is. I’m assuming it’s the configuration shown here, with the telescope tube pointing up and the “south” arrow pointing, ummm, south. After powering on in this position, I was ready to go.

Step one, find the Sun.

When the handpaddle powers up, it comes up in ‘Land’ mode which means you can point the telescope anywhere you want to (using the arrow keys on the paddle) and look at stuff on the horizon or up in the air. No tracking occurs in this position, you just point and look.

To get the clock drives going, you have to hit the ‘Enter’ key when the main display is showing (shown at right, click on the image to see a bigger one) to get it into ‘Cele’ mode, which makes the thing track the sky. This is the screen that displays on initial power up. It took me about an hour to figure that out since it wasn’t documented anywhere. Your welcome.

Now that the drive is driving, I need it to point to the Sun. No problem, this is a goto mount after all, right?

Keep in mind that I did not do the one or two star alignment because, well, I can’t see the stars during the day with my Halpha telescope to do that, no alignment procedure could be performed.

So, with the handpaddle in ‘Cele’ mode, I hit the following keys:

Menu->Select and Slew->Planets,Moon,Sun->Sun

And I get the following screen:

Yes, yes, yes, of course I want to continue, trust me, I’m a professional. Show me the Sun!

One problem… There’s no way to answer this question. Here’s the rest of the keypad:

As you can see, there isn’t a ‘Yes’ key and pressing ‘Enter’ just gave me the AltAz coordinates of the Sun. No slewing, it just beeped. I have still not figured out a way to get the mount to slew to the Sun and track it.

I guess it doesn’t think I can be trusted to look at the Sun.

“No soup for you!”

I solved the problem by manually slewing the mount using the arrow keys until the Sun was centered in the eyepiece. Once I got it there, the mount did a pretty good job of keeping the Sun in the FOV.

I tried and tried to get the mount to track at the solar rate instead of sidereal but no amount of coaxing so far has been able to get me there. I only saw that tracking rate appear once when I accidentally had the mount slew to Neptune. When it thought it was looking at the planet, it switched to the solar rate.

I suppose the way I’ll have to get around the slewing issue is to select the Moon when it is up during the day and sync the mount up to that, then maybe it’ll slew towards the Sun. Another way will be to leave the mount outside and set up after performing a two star alignment on it. Then, when the Sun rises, maybe it’ll slew there.

[UPDATE 10/24/07: I figured out my slewing to the Sun problem. I had my time zone set incorrectly on the hand paddle, it was set seven hours AHEAD of Greenwich, England instead of 7 hours BEHIND (which is where I am). Because of this, the mount never thought the Sun was up where I was and it wouldn't slew to it.

This is a nice mount. It does a great job.]

Overall I like the mount and recommend it. For the money, it has a lot of capability and is very portable. I found the tracking adequate and look forward to it being better when I figure out how to get it to track at the proper rate.

The biggest drawbacks are that the manual is poor and the software is quirky and non-intuitive. Since I’ve only used it on the Sun, I can’t really say much about the database of objects or how accurately it slews to and tracks them.

I’m considering ordering one of their scope packages to see if they would make a good christmas present. I’m particularly intrigued by these.

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