Hi this is Graham from Jenham's Astro i bought this telescope celestron evolution 8 a few
months ago and in this video i'm going to give you feedback now that i've used it enough times to get
a good opinion of it so in this video i want to cover the portability of the scope the wi-fi the
alignment the battery life the noise the finder scope and also the optical tube assembly and the
optics themselves if you think those things could be of interest to you then please click
the subscribe button if you haven't already to subscribe to Jenham's Astro and let's get started
so how portable is a celestron evolution eight well for me i came to this scope having used a
10 inch dobsonian for a while and whilst i really like the aperture i found it a little bit unwieldy
ended up using a trolley to get that scope in and out of my garage and that worked well and
i really liked the fact that there were no wires it was simple observing but i was still looking
for something that maybe i could move more easily and that gave me tracking so enter the celestron
evolution eight it's obviously a wireless model you don't need to take any wires with you when
you go outside i looked online for all the weights and then it's very difficult to compare what that
actually would feel like compared to moving for example my heq5 mount in and out of the house
so really what i'd say is it's all about the weight distribution so this scope comes with some
really good handles on the mount and here on the side of the fork and there you go i can pick this
up carry in and out the house taking a bit of care obviously in one piece and i can leave it set up
like this weight wise the whole thing 42 pounds 19 kilos if you separate out for example the tripod
that's that's 14 pounds so that's six and a half kilos just under if you keep the optical tube
attached to the the mount and just remove it from the tripod with three screws then that part is 28
pounds so basically 28, 14, 42 pounds 19 kilos for the whole thing so i think this is very portable
obviously you could need to break down the tube from the mount if you want to put it into into
your car certainly easier to put it into the the packaging that came with the scope that way
but for me it is definitely something i can carry out and i'm not particularly strong guy it's all
about the distribution you can get this close to your body it's got good handles it doesn't
feel like you're straining yourself carrying this sort of weight so evolutionary a portable scope
so the next thing is wi-fi you take the scope outside you click on the power sets up its own
wi-fi network and you connect to this using your phone in the same way that you connect to any
other wi-fi network now this scope's been around since 2014 and if you look online then wi-fi
connectivity is one of the big bug bears that people have had people have experienced problems
with wi-fi dropout but what i say so far touchwood this scope the connectivity has been excellent you
can see the network on your phone select it celestron network and it stays connected you
can move around within certainly within a few feet walking around the scope at night if you've still
got the phone your phone in your pocket or your tablet in your pocket i've been using an iphone
but i haven't read anything particularly bad about using androids but i can't speak for that
but the wi-fi for me uh connectivity is good and obviously the benefit of that is you're not
carrying around a hand controller although this scope comes with a hand controller it's still in
its box inside no wires nice and easy so so far wi-fi connectivity and setup very straightforward
so what's the next thing you do when you've got your scope connected to wi-fi well you really want
to align it unless you want to just scan around manually so scope comes with various alignment
modes the default one is skyalign in which scenario you point the telescope to three stars
you don't need to know their names and you do an initial rough alignment until you get the star
into the optical into the finder scope the red dot finder and then you do a finer line so that
the star is centered in the eyepiece you do that three times and then your tablet your
phone gives you an alignment status so it's very much like using a hand controller tells you if the
alignment is successful or failed what i would say is i've had some difficulty with skyalign
often even if i've leveled the tripod carefully and really centered the three stars um i still get
an alignment failed so that's a little bit of a mystery to me sometimes it works sometimes it
doesn't what i've found is that i prefer to use the the manual align option and the difference
here is uh you can move it to a star that you can identify so for example a bright star if you've
got some knowledge of the of the night sky which you possibly have with this so it's not generally
a beginner scope so you could choose to point at Arcturus select that on the on the on the app
center it in the same way and then go to some other bright stars that you know sent three of
them again i think it uses two out of the three to actually do the alignment but generally i've found
that manual alignment is more reliable and you can also it's a very neat feature that once you've got
the basic alignment going and you start to use go to so you go to your first object so let's say
you've aligned on arcturus and vega and um maybe a star an ursa major you've got all that working
then you you decide to have a look at the ring nebula and once you've centered it you can then
choose to add that as an additional alignment point so you can you can get up to 10 alignment
points by just adding the objects that you're you're doing go to uh to look at so for me
manual align has been much more straightforward than skyalign but obviously you've got those
options exist on the on the app and there are probably some people that prefer depending on what
sort of sky visibility what other tools whether in a back garden can see the horizon maybe skyalign
works better for more people than it does for me where i've got a relatively restricted view
of of the night sky i can see up but i can't see the horizon but manual line works for me
battery life well because it's wi-fi the idea of this mount is that everything is within everything
you need for a nice observing is integrated into the mount so there is a lithium battery inside
this mount and you can charge it using the mains adapter that comes with the scope you just plug
it in and during the charging you see this logo light oscillating very slowly and eventually after
whatever period of time when the battery is fully charged it's a stable light what have i found so
far i haven't used it in cold weather but i found absolutely no problem using it for a few hours
without any issue i've understood it's supposed to be able to last sort of nine or ten hours
give you a good night's observing so so far at least battery life not a problem at all
um some users who will have had the scope for a longer time and maybe use it in in
in harsher temperatures during the winter then perhaps it drops off a bit but so far so good
so what about noise is this a scope that you could call neighbor friendly so if you use
your scope in your back garden then you might be concerned for the amount of noise that it makes
as you slew around the sky go to in targets so for me what i've discovered is that
if i run this mount at the full rate the maximum speed then i find it a little bit too noisy
at night time so trying to give you an idea of that if i run the motors
so going down and then up in elevation so certainly that is quite noisy and then
side to side
is a little bit quieter so
one of the good features if you look at the the sky portal app and other apps that you can use
then you can adjust the maximum slew rate and that's what i tend to do i tell the scope that
i don't want it to slow around at maximum speed i bring it down from a number four which is maximum
on the on on the portal app down to around two and yeah it takes a bit longer to move between targets
but i'm really not concerned about the noise that it makes and obviously depending on your situation
if you've got a really large back garden or you're out somewhere in the field and
there's no one around you don't care about that you can use the full speed
but for me it's a good feature to be able to to slow down the mount
and then maybe it will last a bit longer i don't know i think the idea of this is that it's got
good quality gears you're paying certainly a lot of money for the mount element of this so
but it isn't it isn't particularly quiet when running on full speed but not a big deal
so what's next well what about the red dot finder now these things are very divisive if you look on
the forums a lot of people just put them straight in the bin consider them to be a piece of junk
and yeah it is a plastic pretty cheap example of a red dot finder that comes standard with this scope
you might think well they saved a bit of cash there i came from this from using my dob regularly
and it had a nice 8 by 50 right angle finder and i thought well i'm going to probably swap that
one out pretty soon when i get the evo running but i found i don't need to for me personally
as long as you've done what you need to do with any red dot finder that's to say you align it
keep it aligned with the optical tube axis then the red dot finder is perfectly sufficient you
only use it to get the initial stars into the field of view of a low power eyepiece
so this scope comes with 40 millimeter plossl eyepiece and this is perfectly sufficient to
to allow you to get the style in that field of view after which you go to
the second stage of alignment the motors run a bit slower and you center it and
bang you've done an alignment so for me yeah older liked it perhaps to come with a metal bodied red
dot finder but it's nitpicking really it works for me i can adjust it fairly easily in the normal way
to point during to point to the to the same axis of the scope itself and perfectly good enough no
need for an upgrade certainly on day one so what about the optics no scope is any good unless the
optics are good now this is standard evolutionary it's not the edge model which in the uk is another
um seven or eight hundred pounds on top of the price of the basic optical tube but you
may have seen a video on my channel pointing out the problems i had with the first delivery had
some scratches on the corrector some blemishes for certainly not a perfect scope that one went back
this one looked like you when when i got it optically is it any good so the first few
nights when i was getting used to the scope i was mainly concentrating on using the app to
get all the alignment stuff going a bit hit and miss there with the manual line skyline
after that i concentrated on how good the alignment was now it was a little bit off
the collimation was a little bit off this scope you have to adjust it it comes with the standard
screwdriver kind of method so always a bit um stressful to do that but did a tweak
high power got the collimation spot on and so far touchwood is hell collimation so
what are the views like well i'd say they're really very good i've used the scope quite a bit
so far on globulars double stars some high magnification stuff just really to test out its
resolution i've been doing it that in conjunction with using my new bada morpheus there's a video
on my channel for that eyepiece and i would say that it's a really really nice combination
quality is very good i'd say for most observers it's going to be absolutely all that you need if
you want to look at well certainly if you look at something like the ring nebula i've looked at for
probably through i don't know 20 or 30 different types of scopes over the years this was a really
nice view really good contrast nice resolution of the stars and certainly it'll split tight doubles,
epson lyrae, izar you're down there at two or three arc seconds absolutely no problem at all
once it's collimated so i haven't used it on the planets yet i'll come back to that on another day
but so far i'd say it the optical tube assembly quality is good yeah it comes with
one and a quarter inch visual back it's possibly something that's not far down the upgrade list but
absolutely good to go when you get it out of the box so summary for me after uh
quite a lot of time with this scope i'd say it is a really nice package and it certainly
delivers what i hoped it would it's got a lot of nice features for observing it has got these big
chunky handles it's got a nice eyepiece tray that you can use and easily find it
has a little light that illuminates it you can adjust the brightness of
more places in the on the tripod spreader bar to store eyepieces as well really nice features
doesn't have anything that you don't need like i say it hasn't cluttered the assembly with a big
finder you don't need anything extra to this it's got nice big large diameter easy to spot
color-coded quite smart our wheels so you can tighten down the axis if you want to manually move
around and everything really everything just works yeah it's not the easiest thing to first locate
the the mount on top of the tripod perhaps if you've separated the two things but you know with
a bit of practice that's pretty straightforward and it's just three screws that most of us
familiar with for attaching the scope so really it is an evolution certainly not revolution but
it gives you the features you actually want getting rid of the wires having the wi-fi
being able to carry it yeah you're paying quite a lot of money for this package but i would say
so far it is is delivering i'm really looking forward to using this scope and making some more
videos to show you maybe photographing some of the objects i can see to give you a better idea
of of what it actually is like to use it so hope's been useful definitely a thumbs up for me for
this scope if you haven't subscribed yet to janet jenner's astro please hit the subscribe button now
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