Telescope Buying Guide: GoTo Mounts

Video Transcript

"Another type of telescope mounting system growing in popularity is called the GoTo mount. These mounts typically are fork-driven. What you see here with the double fork drive, and single fork drive over here, but they can be equatorial as well. Now GoTo does have electronic devices, electronic motors for both axes, and they come with a little computer hand controller here as well. Now typically they still stay pretty portable and lightweight, and what you need to do with a GoTo mount is they have to be properly aligned with two objects in the night sky. So even with a GoTo mount, you need to know the names of two or three bright stars in the sky to go out and help you give you a point of reference. For instance, when I turn this beast on right here, the first thing it's going to do is do a little dance for me--it's going to find North, it's going to find level, and it--based on the information it gets from the GPS--it knows where it's at on the planet and it is going to pick out a star that it wants me to fine tune it to. So this time of year it might say "Okay, now I know where I'm at. I'm slewing over here to Betelgeuse, which is up in Orion." And to get that way and then it'll stop and the hand controller, the prompt here, will ask me to center that star in the eyepiece. This is where I would use my finder scope, which we will cover up here a little bit. Now once I've identified that star in the eyepiece, I hit my button once, I've identified the star as Betelgeuse, the scope will pick out a second star in the sky. This is giving the scope, the mount, a point of reference. So once you do a two star alignment with the telescope--some do require three star alignment--the telescope knows where it's at and will now find objects for you or even take you on a guided tour of the universe. You'll use the hand controller to help center the two alignment stars. From there your scope is properly initialized and it knows where it's at on the planet, and you can begin asking it for objects to find for you. For example, Messier. You see Caldwell, you see NCG, these are ways to categorize deep sky objects. The Messier catalog is here, if I want to see Messier 51, I would hit the M button, 51, enter, and the telescope would go there for me. Also, once it's on the object it will track there for me as well, until I ask it to go to another object. There's even a guided tour on the hand controller as well. So if you don't know anything about what's up in the night sky tonight, just push the guided tour and the telescope, the internal features, will start with the brightest objects and pick out fifteen or twenty of the highlights of the night sky, tell you what they are, where they're located, what constellation they're in, and if you hook it up to your computer it'll even talk to you. Very fancy."