All new products have first-run issues, whether in the product itself or in the documentation, and also in the initial dearth of best practices. These tips and collected wisdom might help you get better enjoyment from your EduSnap 53ED telescope.
- The actual balance point for the telescope tube in the mount is right where the black and white parts join. Place the tightening screw here to not only improve the balance a bit, but also to grip the Dovetail with less play than if you placed the screw in the pre-drilled flat hole. I think this fixed detente was intended to make initial assembly easier, but the wiggle introduced by the flat contact zone may lead to image alignment issues.
- Ensure the telescope body has enough room to swing vertically by raising the tripod mast by at least 5 inches/115mm.
Mine came with a 12-page manual. If you watch the campaign video, you will see all the setup operations that the manual describes. The essential points are:
1. Raise the tripod mount about 125mm or 5 inches so that the swinging camera can clear the leg hardware.
2. There is no clutch on either axis. To start evening observations, physically rotate the tripod to point the left-hung scope roughly north. When you connect the power cord, the scope and mount will nod down and to one side and back to start in a no-backlash condition. This is why no clutch is actually needed for sky tracking. But this also means that, for terrestrial observing, you have to use the app's button controls to repoint the scope. For this reason, it is primarily a sky scope.
3. After being plugged in and resetting the encoders to a no-backlash state, the mount's Wifi network turns on. Look on your phone or tablet for a network beginning with EDU_... and connect to its with password 12345678. Now open the app and press the Connect Device button. The app can now control the mount via the network.
4. If your goal is terrestrial viewing, you will only operate the joystick interface, usually in eyepiece mode. You can make a photo by switching the bronze lever to camera mode. As long as you have not initiated sky tracking, the camera behaves just like a point and shoot camera. You can tweak the exposure and gain, but in general, I find that it just does the right thing, unsophisticatedly.
5. The true purpose of this scope, though, is astrophotography. Switch the bronze lever to the camera mode. When you select a target and hit [Go To], the mount will slew the scope to the approximate location (using the encoders that were reset at turn on) and then nudge the rest of the way using a method called plate solving in which it compares exposures it makes to the known stars near the object. If a targets does not have enough stars for plate solving, you'll get a message to try another target. You don't have to reset anything for a new go to; the encoders seem to keep track of motion history and can usually slew to the next target.
6. Most targets are not visually distinctive in either the eyepiece or the live camera view. Trust the force and try the camera anyway. The logic switches from the single-exposure terrestrial mode to a set of parameters that automate a series of short captures that are progressively stacked into an eventual final image. As you gain experience, you can modify the exposure, gain (sensitivity), and number of exposures.
That's information that I personally wish the manual contained. Good luck, and watch for other great tips that are starting to pop up in these community notes!
Marketing Specs
Auto Star Alignment
Auto Star Finder
Auto Stack
Auto Image Processing
Starlight Sensor IMX662 (notionally records at 1920 x 1080 with 2.9 um cell size)
High-Quality ED Objective Lens, 53mm x 265mm f/5 ED achromat
32GB High-Capacity Storage (apparently still a future app feature)
2.4G/5G Dual-Mode WIFI
Pocket-Sized & Portable
Hack the tripod
Before I screw the mount onto the tripod, I raise the lift and drop an empty toilet paper cardboard tube over the raised thread. After I screw the mount onto this thread, I lower the rail until the cardboard tube seats snugly on both ends. Then I tighten the tripod. The tube actually resists movement in the column. And it looks like pier extensions for other scopes.
Provide an azimuth rotator
The documentation advises literally picking up the mount and tripod combo during alignment for aiming north. I am doodling on ideas for adding an azimuth rotator plate to avoid re-leveling the tripod at each reset.
I am considering either cake decorating rotator or Pentax-thread (42mm x 1.omm) rotators.
A better level for setup
I hate squinting g at the tiny le el on the tripod.
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