Celestron StarSense Explorer

I’ve tried to get my telescope centered using this app by aligning it to the moon’s location, and I’m being dissatisfied by the app’s performance as when I tried to aligning the telescope through the app, the lens showed a blank sky because the telescope was offset to the right of the telescope’s direction of focus. I had to literally manually align the telescope due to this. I do have a screenshot of what I am speaking of. Finding planets took me time because of a similar scenario. It would be great if the app could make improvements with aligning the iPhone so that telescope users won’t have to turn on their battery powered laser that comes with their StarSense explorer telescopes or any other telescope of this brand.

I opened the app and it looks great. I’m ready to start with my telescope, it’s my first telescope, so I’m really excited to start working on it so then I get the app and then I try to set it up so then I go to the quick setup and I set it up and it’s already it’s aligned and then I looked at the app and then in the night sky I pointed a word. It says that it was Saturn but then when I looked through the lens, there’s nothing so then I opened this other app called Stellarium where it shows me the night sky where I can move my phone around and it shows me what’s in front of me and where things are and then it shows that Mars is in a completely different direction so then I have to rely on that which is harder to do than with the app so then I have to rely on my eyes and that app that’s hard to do so if you could please update this app and have it use the same thing that Stellarium has but just at an angle because where you put your phone it’s slanted so if you could please update it that would be nice thank you.

I would recommend this product with six stars if the app had half the functionality of Celestron’s SkyPortal freeware, and ten stars if it lived up to the SkySafari engine that runs them both. I manage a large lending library of telescopes for my local club, and own a dozen telescopes ranging from $250 up to $7500, but bought this one for outreach and pure curiosity to try out the mounted app-driven interface. It could be the perfect storm, and to be honest, I’m not sure why Celestron chose to 1) attach it to their lowest line of hobby-killer junk telescopes and 2) dumb down and cripple the utility of the app so as to make it only useful in the most basic and prescriptive way. I should be shocked, but guess that I’m not, since the platform represents a potential threat to their own top of the line go-to tech. As sold, its an enabling tool with *so* much potential, but in practice, the functionality of the app and cell phone mount (let’s face it, the only reason to try the thing out) is so dumbed down as to be nearly useless. Two stars because it works, but soooo disappointed. Rookie move, Celestron.