hi this is Graham from Jenham's Astro this is the second video about this
telescope the skywatcher starquest 102 mc in the other video i
unboxed and assembled this telescope and we saw how it fitted together well
in this video i'm going to continue showing you some of the features of the
telescope how to set it up and then we're going to try it out at
night and see how it performs
so one of the features i didn't cover in the first video is the ability of this
mount to operate in both an equatorial and an altazimuth mode
what does that mean well in the unboxing in the assembly video we set up as an
equatorial that is to say we set this mount so that
this angle here of this piece is was set to
the latitude of our observing location now the idea there is that that kind of
setup of mount can be basically aligned with north and
then you can follow stars just by moving one
of these slow motion control rods and that's a very convenient thing to do
at night because you only have to adjust one of these rods in order to
keep a target in the field of view but this
mount has got a second feature it can also be used
in an up down mode more like a camera tripod and that is called an
altazimuth mode and the way that you can achieve that with this mount
is to loosen off this bolt like so and then rotate the mount
until
you've got this basically horizontal and then
let's move this in get a clearer view when the mount
is set up like this one of the slow motion rods
is panning left and right and the other one is tilting up and down
and that's an intuitive way to use the mount so
this star quest mount has that option of
rotating the axis of the mount so you can use it
either way round so if you're using as a spotting scope then this is probably
during the day then this is a more convenient way of
of setting it up whereas if you're going to do nighttime astro
probably equatorial is the way to go
so another feature that's worth experimenting with and setting up
during the day is a red dot finder so you remember we attached the red dot
finder to the to the telescope in the unboxing and
assembly and all we did was attach it onto this bracket
well what you'll find when you use a telescope like this a Maksutov
it gives you a high magnification but that also comes with a small field of
view so the idea of the red dot finder is to
allow you to point the telescope um to your target in the night sky or in
indeed during the day if you're using it as a spotting scope
but it must be aligned with the axis of the telescope it must be
projecting a red dot onto the sky that is in the same position
that the telescope is looking now because
the field of view is so small it's something you need to set up otherwise
you can get into quite a frustrating situation where
you think you're pointing the scope towards the moon even something that's
big and obvious and should be easy to find and you can't actually get it into
the eyepiece of the scope so the way that you do this is you put
the the red dot finder on to the scope i do this during the day
always taking care not to point the scope anywhere near the sun
and i focus it point it towards a very distant object
for example a telephone pole a spire
a tree on the horizon and have a look through the main eyepiece of
the telescope and get it such that object is in the
eyepiece and after that simply look through the
red dot finder here's the switch here turns it on
that as you turn it it brightens up the intensity
of the red dot and then you should see just about quite tricky during the day
but you should be able to see especially if you put your hand over like this
gives you an idea where the red dot is relative to that
that object that tree for example and then after you've done that
you can adjust using this knob is an up and down movement of the red dot finder
and then this one is a left to right movement
and you can do that so that you can then superimpose that red dot
onto the object that you're looking at you know that you've got the telescope
pointed out once you've done that it's all set up
and then you'll find that once you get out under the night sky
you can reliably use the red dot finder to find
an astro target
okay so hopefully now you're familiar with how to set up the telescope you've
got your red dot finder aligned you've decided how you're going to
set up the mount and you're basically ready to go so the next part of the
video we're going to have a look at how well
the telescope performs optically because basically any telescope
is the main feature is that it can give you good
views of the night sky so the way i'm going to do this
is i'm going to try to show you what you might see if you're looking through the
standard eyepieces of the star quest 102 so i'm not going
to put any fancy digital slr astro camera on in
order to do that i'm just going to hold a smartphone over the
the eyepiece and what in fact to make that work a little bit better hopefully
i've got an adapter here which will allow me to clamp the phone over the
eyepiece and all that's really doing is stopping
it wobbling around too much so what we're going to do is we're going
to
take it outside set it up and i'm just going to video what the camera is seeing
and that should just give you an idea realistically what can you see with this
scope without buying any more kit
so first target is the moon uh i think it's one day past full
and this is the view you'll get um using the lower power eyepiece the 25
millimeter eye piece and you can see that it fits nicely into
the field of view of the Maksutov
and then if we switch to the other eyepiece the 10 millimeter eyepiece
we can let the moon drift through the field of view
this time with a magnification of 130 so it's always good to look at the what's
called the terminator of the moon that's the division between
the light and the dark because that's where you can see the shadows in craters
and other features most clearly but it's still
nice to just let the rotation of the earth
drift the moon through the field of view
now something different this is albireo which is a very famous double star in
the constellation of cygnus and the maksutov picks up the different
colours of the two stars very well so Cygnus is a constellation that's
overhead in the northern hemisphere during the
summer and Alberio is at the far extreme of the constellation
symbolizing the beak of the swan
so moving on to the planets if you've got a Maksutov f you're bound to want
to look at the planets and this is the view you'll get when you first
look at jupiter using the standard
eyepieces so you can just see it drifting into the field of view
you can see the planet is very bright uh disc
and it's surrounded in this case by four of its galilean moons
so the moons that you see will vary night to night and it's fascinating to
be able to work out which one is which just gives you an idea of what you will
see now with the naked eye you get a better
view than this it's been pretty tricky to capture
what this looks like using the smartphone approach that i've taken
so if you can bear with me and this view tries to show that you will be
able to capture some detail on the on the disc of jupiter you'll see
some bands and generally i think you'll get a
better impression than the one that this video is giving
so jupiter a prime target for the Maksutov.
and then surely this must be the best view you're going to find in the solar
system this is the planet saturn it's drifting through the field of view
of the 10 millimeter eyepiece
and then just to give you an idea i've used the camera zoom
to show a little bit closer up view
okay so what are my thoughts on the skywatcher starquest 102?
mc well it's definitely grab and go it's really lightweight you can carry it
around in one hand and that's really what i'm looking for
when i want to scope that i want to take outside for a quick look
and when i don't want any hassle with cables and laptops and any other
gubbins that can come with astronomy and asteroid photography
i think for the price it's a good package you should really get some good
views of the uh the moon and the planets and
a lot of other objects that are well suited to max stops such as globulars
and double stars and on the sampler one optically it seems to be a pretty good
performer the mount well i really like the mount
it's very simple lightweight but surprisingly stable
given um its small form so i think
it's a new generation mount and with the slow motion control rods it's
very easy to control the telescope without any particular care to alignment
or or set up what else i mean there are a
few niggles there's a few points where we can see that it's been made to a
budget for example this optical tube assembly
doesn't contain any feature to allow collimation
and collimation being the alignment of the mirrors inside the telescope well
that is a limitation but realistically what i say is
as long as you test out your scope when you bought it
uh when you first buy it and you check that you're happy that you can get a
good for example high magnification view of
the moon then after that fingers crossed unless
you you drop it um or give it a good bump
then that collimation that alignment of the optics
should remain in place so you haven't got the option to fix it if you do
misalign it by mishandling but hopefully you won't have to
a few other bits and pieces on the mount the slow motions you have to make sure
that they're mounted two or three millimeters um off
from the end of the attachment point otherwise when you
rotate them the screw here can uh end up snagging on the mount but
that's really just a small detail you can easily set up to avoid it
happening other than that yeah i really like it
i'd say for me as a glasses wearer 25 millimeter
eyepiece is fine that's definitely gets you
started and the quality is okay a 10 millimeter
eyepiece really doesn't work for me the eye relief the distance behind the
lens that i have to hold my eye in order to to see the image is just too
small so personally speaking that 10 millimeter eyepiece is going to
go in the bin or certainly i'm going to replace it
with better eyepiece but at least the unit comes ready to go
with a diagonal and two eyepieces and you have to sort of see
how they suit you so overall if you're looking for a
telescope for high magnification and maybe you're
new to astronomy i think
it's a good place by getting one of these i think it's good value
a couple of hundred pounds in the uk option to set it up
in altazimuth or equatorial mode nice and simple yeah worth the money
okay so i hope this video has been useful uh please
like the video if you have liked it and if you haven't subscribed to Jenham's
Astro please click on the subscribe button if
you'd like to see further videos like this
so thanks for watching um i'll try and do a follow-up video where i do
actually take some astro photos using an astro camera
and we'll see then what you can get from a small Maksutov
if you take the next step into astrophotography
okay bye for now