The Orion Intelliscope hand controller

By Klaas van Ditzhuyzen

Following a 5 year old review of the XT-8 itself on the Cloudynights forum I want to review the Intelliscope handcontroller in depth. Last September I purchased an XT-10i (slightly larger than the XT-8i) but furthermore the same. I live in Holland and used it the first months on a balcony of an apartment in a light polluted city in the Netherlands which is definitely not the best location. But I was able to work with the hand controller. It is rather easy to align: turn on the device then the display shows POINT VERTICAL, point the telescope vertical and press Enter. Then find a star appearing in the list, center it in the high power eyepiece (I use a Nagler 13T6 for this) press Enter (it shows 'THANK YOU') and repeat the same for another star in the list which is in the visible sky. Ready. Very easy. However when you have access to only a limited part of the sky (as from an apartment balcony) it can be difficult to find alignment stars which are not too close to each other. Moon and planets cannot be used as alignment, probably due to the lack of a real time clock, see later. The user cannot fill in custom alignment objects either.

Left the hand controller in its initial state and right the same as a 'glow-in-the-dark'.

The brightness of the LCD can be adjusted in five steps and is initially set to the middle step. It is mixed green and red colored but I found out that even at the brightest, the display is hard to read in the dark even at the brightest setting. Maybe this is sample specific because there are people who find the display even too bright in the dimmest setting. So I attached an external red LED conuming 20mA powered by the same internal 9V battery. I measured the power consumption which is less than 10mA in the dimmest setting up to 43mA in the brightest setting which is rather high for such dim LEDs.

What is very useful is that when an object is found the user can press ENTER which allows this object to realign the scope by first centering the object and then pressing Enter. This improves accuracy. Pressing FCN after alignment shows the equatorial coordinates (RA and declination) where ths scope is pointed to and remains in this mode (even after moving the scope) until a next object is searched by the controller. Useful for searching objects such as comets which are not in the list.

Finding obects is easy: it shows two arrows how to move the scope and when the separation is less than ten degrees, it shows the separation in 0.1 degree steps. But when closer then 0.5 degree it is rather tedious to get the 0.0 point as the stationary friction of the teflon bearings is a lot higher than the moving friction. When using a low power eyepiece with a FOV of more than 1 degree this is not an issue.

Another issue I found is that in the cold (less than 5°C) the contrast of the display (which is not very good anyway) degrades rapidly and makes it even useless at subfreezing temperatures..This is a strange thing as the largest market for these scopes are North America and Europe with cold winter observing sessions which make this device virtually useless, unless the user uses a heating device to keep it warm. Anyway the best is to store the device indoors and plug it in the scope at every use in winter and unplug after use.

Looking up deep sky goes quickly, just press M / NGC or IC followed by the number and then Enter. The other options (Nebula / Galaxy, etc. ) let first choose you a constellation by selecting a 3 letter code (e.g. ori, cru, cma). I know these but many users don't know these codes so why not display the full name ? Then a list of objects within this constellation. When star searching there are two possibilities: 1) Selecting from a list of catalog numbers which is however specific to this device and not a well-known star catalog. 2) The other way is scrolling through a (long!) list of stars which is not listed by constellation in this case (why ?).

In all cases, objects below the horizon are listed as well which makes scrolling unnecessarily twice as long. When using is a summer night in the Netherlands I see constellations like Orion, Crux passing by in the list which are not visible at that time. After alignment the system 'knows' which objects there are in the sky. This is obviouosly not the case at alignment time.

Finding planets works the same as M / NGC / IC but the device has no real time clock built in, so when entering planet mode the user has first to fill in the current date and time at every observing session. This is rather weird as currenly virtually every consumer-electronics device has a builtin clock.

I (ab)use the Altazimuth test mode (Press ENTER + ON when powered off) for finding stars / planets in daylight. For more see here which works fine (together with planetarium software on a smartphone / laptop).

Overview of the (dis) advantages:

Positive points:

• Fast and easy alignment
• Easy search of objects
• RA and declination (equatorial) mode
• Altazimuth display when in Altazimuth diagnostics mode
• Encoders on the scope axes can be diagnosed and adjusted by the user by 'encoder test' and 'altazimuth' mode
• Identify an object in the field
• Re-alignment possible after finding an object to improve accuracy
• No power consuming slewing motors needed to find objects from a database
• As a result, only simple single 9V battery needed (a rechargeable also works)

Need improvement:

• No real time clock built in
• Display is poorly cold weather reststant
• Hardly readable in the dark for some users
• Unnecessarily lists objects below horizon
• Limited list of alignment stars
• Green leds destroy night vision more than red ones

Conclusion

Orion has made a nice object finding device which works fine without power consuming slewing motors. When they issue a new firmware version with the issues above fixed then it would be even more useful.