Telescope Reviews: ETX-LS Reviews?

I've been a long time lurker here on cloudy nights, but having just purchased my ETX-LS and gotten it working, I thought I would post a first light review since there don't seem to be that many out there.

Prior to this scope, I had a 6" dob with a few eye pieces that I mainly used for planetary imaging, along with a pair of good old binoculars. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts at learning the night sky, I always seemed to have issues finding the objects that I wanted to view that evening. Over time, my desire for a GOTO scope grew, and I finally reached the point where I pulled the trigger on the LS.

I had considered several other scopes, but to be frank, the ones I truly lusted after were way outside of a reasonable price range.

In any case, I opted for the LS specifically for its auto-align feature set. I have a 19 month old son, and the ability to simply turn this thing on, and come back when I was ready to view was just too tempting to turn down.

I purchased my scope over ebay from a shop in NJ. I used the bing.com 10% off trick along with a mrrebates.com 3% off to end up with a final shipped price of $1219 for the ACF version of the scope.

The scope arrived in only two days due to my proximity to the shipper (I live in the eastern panhandle of WV) and I was lucky enough to have some fantastic weather for the evening of the unboxing.

The build was quite frankly, trivial. Pull out the tripod, install the leg spreader, and slap the scope on top. There are three screws to fix the scope base to the tripod, and while I didn't bother to look once I had it on there, there seemed to be a satisfying 'snap' into place when I put the scope base on the mount the first time which lined the threads up nicely.

Once the mounting procedure was done, all that was left was to install the diagonal, and toss some batteries into the thing, which I did in about 5 minutes.

A quick aside here about using batteries to power this thing...just don't. I had to for the first night since I didn't have the AC adapter, but I would never run it without the AC adapter. It just *devours* batteries. Even with rechargables, I think that anyone who is using it for more than an hour or so will start to run into low voltage problems eventually. Just bit the bullet and get the AC adapter now.

In any case, total time to setup the scope from breaking the tape seal on the box to having it standing outside on my deck was approximately 20 minutes. Very easy.

Not being willing to wait for proper dark, I uncapped the scope and the camera, and powered the thing on. I was greeted by a voice introduction to the scope, and with voice prompts informing me about what exactly the scope was doing at any given point during its bootstrapping process. GPS fix, finding level and north, searching for a guide star, etc. The scope was actually smart enough to admonish me for trying to do an auto-setup with so much light out, and in fact, refused to even try. It simply told me that it was too bright out, and that I could use it for terrestrial viewing for now.

So, I poked around and pointed it at some guys house a mile away up the mountain and played around. Nothing really spectacular while I waited for dark.

I did try again maybe 20 minutes after sunset, and the scope was unable to perform an alignment, but I suspect it was simply too bright out at that point still.

At this point, I made my first big mistake. See, I am a huge nerd, and I just can't leave well enough alone. So I thought to myself, well as long as I have time, I'll go and upgrade all the firmware and software for the scope! A great use of time right? *sigh*.

In my excitement, I failed to notice that my scope had shipped with the appropriate firmware already flashed into the handbox. I ended up flasing a much older version onto the device, which causes a 'FIRMWARE ERROR. RELOAD FIRMWARE' message on the box. Panic.

I ran around for a few minutes, during which time the autostar updater reconnected with the handbox, determined that it no longer had the most current firmware on it, and proceeded to notify me of a newer (the one I originally had on the thing) firmware was available. I told it to download the 235 meg file, and waited impatiently for what I hoped was the fix for my screwup.

After about an hours worth of downloading (I do live in WV and broadband out here is hard to come by), the new firmware was applied to the handbox, verified and the handbox was rebooted. Success! Thankfully, the re-flash worked like a charm to un-botch what I had botched. I was glad that the program handled the screwup fairly cleanly and I wasn't stuck sending the handbox off to be reflashed at the factory.

So now that I had wasted an hour and a half, it was properly dark! I powered up the scope again, and was happy to find that it was able to align itself completely automatically. The process involves slewing to a star, exposing a picture and performing some analysis on the picture to determine if the scope is in the right place. You are informed of each of these steps on the handbox as they are going on.

Once the alignment was correct, I had it slew on over to the moon of course, and was greeted with a nice, mostly centered practically full moon blasting light into my eye. Forgot my polarizing filter, whoops. Anyway, on over to jupiter. Again, the planet was in view, but not truly centered. This didn't bother me too much as I know there is a method to better train the drive later on. It was definitely 'close enough' for me, and I was thrilled that the GOTO was working as I had hoped.

The scope has a set of guided tours, the most interesting of which (to me at least) is the Best Of tour. The idea is that the scope will take you on a tour of some of the best views of objects that are 'up' that evening. I launched the tour and skipped over the moon and jupiter which were the first two objects listed. The scope then suggested the butterfly open cluster, so I had it take me over there.

If you press ENTER on the handbox, you are provided with two pieces of media. The first of which describes the general class of object you are going to be looking at (planet, open cluster, double star, nebula, etc). After the first bit is done, Sandy Wood of NPR fame comes on and give a brief specific description of the object that is somewhere between 15 seconds and a minute long. Frankly, I loved this feature, and feel that it will be tremendous for helping newbies to realize what they are looking at and why exactly it is cool.

After the audio intro plays, the scope slews on over to the object. Once again, it was in the field of view of the 26mm eyepiece I was using, but not 100% centered. Views were excellent due to the fine seeing, though the insanely bright moon I'm sure was cutting into my experience somewhat.

I do want to mention the view of Alberio that the tour took me on. The double star was frankly just stunning. The yellow and blue pair were bright, crisp, and the colors were vibrant in a way that they were not through my dob. I think I actually stood there and said 'wow' a few times outloud to no one in particular while gazing at it.

To make a long story short, I skipped around through the Best Of tour for another two hours or so before the scope went low voltage and requested a reboot. I packed it up at that point and took it inside. It was fairly manageable weight wise, and far less unwieldy than my dob of the same apature.

Overall, I am very pleased with this scope and in fact had it out again the next night. Same experience with the lighting, you really do need to wait at least 30-40 minutes after dark to even attempt the alignment, even though they guide stars it was choosing are easily visible to the naked eye.

I checked out a few of the messier objects last night, again with great weather. Unfortunately, the full moon was once again insanely bright and was washing out most of the views. The ring nebula was in fact a ring, but most of the other stuff was 'fuzzy gray blob' at best, or simply washed out to the point of being unviewable at worst (though I don't consider this to be a problem with the scope of course).

Tonight I hope to have a chance to train the drives and center the camera tracking so that objects end up closer to the center of the view. I'll keep everyone posted should any other issues arise. I hope this was helpful.