Sky and Telescope - April 2018 - 62

S&T Test Report

from one object to
why I said earlier that
the next but then ﬁnd
this review didn't start
the azimuth motion
off well. The answer
reverse direction and
can be summed up
turn nearly 360° to
in three words - the
get back to the general
instruction manual.
area where you were
Regardless of what
just looking.
I might intuitively
There are a few
know about setting up
subtle differences
telescopes, for the sake
between the SynScan
of a review I always
system and other Go
follow the step-by-step
To scopes I've used,
instructions in the
but overall I was
manual. I can't recall
very pleased with its
assembly instrucoperation and features.
tions worse than
I've not used a lot of
those for the Stargate.
Dobsonian scopes
In addition to easily
with Go To pointing,
recognized mistakes
but I found this one to
such as referring to
p The SynScan hand control has
illuminated buttons and is typical of
be very accurate, and
the secondary-mirror
many of today's Go To systems. The
the tracking excellent.
assembly as the priauthor found it easy to master.
Furthermore, you can
mary-mirror assembly,
disengage the motor
there are misidentiﬁed
clutches on both axes and move the
parts mentioned in the text that make
scope manually to any part of the sky
the assembly procedure confusing. But
and reengage the clutches and resume
even worse are the diagrams, many of
observing without having to re-initialwhich are riddled with errors. There are
ize the drives. A very nice feature.
mislabeled diagrams; diagrams with
missing labels; and diagrams mentioned
in the text that simply don't exist. The
Why the Rocky Start?
worst of these errors involved the novel
With so many positive things going for
cable system used for the altitude drive,
the Stargate, you're probably wondering

p As described in the text, the author found this $8 furniture dolly an
excellent way to move the fully assembled scope over hard surfaces,
including on a lengthy trek down his street to a neighbor's yard to view
an occultation by Neptune's moon Triton last October 5th. It was a simple
matter to lift each of the scope's three legs just enough to slip bricks under
them, creating a solid base for the scope to sit on.

62

A PR I L 2 018 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

so the manual will be less of a problem
for people who don't purchase a Stargate model with drives. But I found the
Go To pointing and tracking to be so
valuable that I would strongly recommend people consider getting the scopes
with motor drives.
After working through the scope's
frustrating assembly procedure, I worried that things were going to get even
worse. When I initially unpacked the
telescope from its four large shipping
boxes there was a prominent slip of
paper with the bold headline "Attention." It directed me to the Sky-Watcher
website to download the latest version
of the SynScan ﬁrmware and install it
using instructions in the manual.
This is rather common for today's
computerized scopes, but I was dismayed to see that the latest version of
the ﬁrmware was dated more than six
months before the Stargate was shipped
to me for review, and the version of
ﬁrmware in my hand control was even
older. An update was clearly needed to
keep the review accurate, but I certainly
wasn't looking forward to another
round of step-by-step instructions in
the manual.
But here's the punchline: The whole
procedure went precisely as described
in the SynScan manual and took about

Here's a sneak peek of the new nightvision system we'll be reviewing in the
coming months. It was awarded a Hot
Product in last January's issue (page 35)
and is seen here on the Stargate with an
optional iPhone adapter. It was used for
the "snapshot" at far right of the planetary
nebula NGC 7662 in Pegasus, better
known as the Blue Snowball Nebula. Deepsky astrophotography with an iPhone - we
do live in interesting times....
Sky and Telescope - April 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - April 2018
