Celestron SkyPortal WiFi Module - Smartphone Control Telescope WiFi Adapter

I use this device with the Sky Safari Pro app and the CELESTRON Sky Portal app. No problems wifi connecting with my Android phone, and Apple iPad. I find these apps easy to use to wirelessly controll my 4SE. I also notice once the telescope is dialed in, it is more accurate with acquiring objects with the app more then the hand controller. Objects are more centered using this wifi dongle. Get one. It works great.

I had heard mixed reviews about the SkyPortal Wifi module. And there is a bit of a curve in connecting the device to my phone. But once I realized to click "Yes" on my Android, it connected perfectly. Also, the first time I used it out on my side yard, the alignment was successful the first time. Once the alignment was complete, I chose Jupiter. It was very close with just a few slight up and to right to center the planet. By the way, I only started the hobby in August 2022. So, I am not a pro by any means, but it worked and will make my observation of planets and nebula easier. One closing point, purchase the Celestron Aux Port Splitter. It will dangle below the control base and not interfere with the operation of the telescope. I own a Celestron NexStar 8se. I would highly recommend it!!!

I purchased an 8” Evolution scope in 2018 with 2nd gen on-board wifi. Could never get it to work with my home wifi and in the direct access mode the scope was very slow to respond to commands from SkySafari on iOS, and would disconnect periodically. Reading up on this the 1st gen wifi was crappy, but the new one was supposed to be quite good. I figured it was my wifi or my phone or just bad Celestron quality control, but couldn’t be bothered to ship the whole thing back to Celestron to check it out. After more research I decided to try this dongle, just to confirm what was up. Turns out the external module works a treat - instant and stable access to home wifi and in direct connect mode too. Quick response to controls. Faultless. Worth every penny in making my scope what it should have been out of the box. If your Evolution mount wifi is not up to expectations, try this. One star off for Celestron headaches.

I wish I had gotten this sooner. I am using it on a Celestron Nexstar 8se and it works great! It easily connected to my iPad and my home Wi-Fi. I am using the iPad with the Celestron App for aligning the telescope as well as for the go-to features instead of the handset. It is so much easier with the app. I did see the benefit of having a motorized focused after trying this out with the app and have ordered that too. I’ll put a review up for that once I get it in and have a chance to put it to use. I definitely recommend this wi-if module, just don’t forget to also get an accessory port splitter if you also use StarSense or other accessories.

Oh my goodness! This device with the free SkyPortal app from Celestron (by Sky Safari) makes nighttime astronomy with my CPC 1100 telescope an incredible amount of fun. The old hand controller doesn't begin to compare to how easy this is to use, continue to learn and navigate about the sky. Quickly learning about star names, features, constellations and finding all those allusive deep nebula and clusters. Detailed information about anything in the sky is just a couple touches away, including full narration about what your looking at. Neptune and Uranus were awesome to see and the alignment procedure of my telescope is now so easy. Not sure what your looking at? Just point the telescope and the SkyPortal app (through the skyQ) Shows you the star name, particular information and the constellation you looking at all right on the screen. The app also had night time viewing (dim red) to keep your night vision in tact. The guys at Celestron definitely hit a home run with this one! This works with any of the Celestron go-to telescopes. I had some issues at first. It seems I was experiencing a conflict between the original hand controller and the SkyQ/SkyPortal App). I did not see in the instructions were told me to not have my hand controller plugged in but they must conflict somehow. Once I unplugged the hand controller and restarted everything, the telescope quickly becomes aligned everything worked perfectly. Update 10 June 2016. I upgraded my telescope to an 11" Edge HD telescope on a CGEM DX mount and have lots more use to report on. In warmer weather I still regularly use and prefer the WIFI Skyportal. When it's really cold I use the hand controller as I can wear gloves when operating. I did also upgrade to SkySafari Pro 5 and really like the extra features including comets, asteroids and identifying various satellites including alerts when the ISS International Space Station as well as Iridium flares will occur overhead. Just a note for no matter what kind of mount you have- be sure to balance your scope to maintain dead on goto accuracy. Update-22Nov 16. I am now using an Ipad Pro with Sky Safari 5 and it continues to work great and totally love it! EVERYONE- DONT FORGET TO UNPLUG YOUR HAND CONTROLLER when using Skyportal as the two do not work well together! I did add a photo of the compatibility list below

Couldn't get it I got my first telescope - a 2.4" Tasco - when I was thirteen years old (late 1960s) and it stayed with me through college. Life and work got in the way so it stayed in its case until the early 1990s when I upgraded to a 10" Meade Cassegrain with equatorial mount. Got the full package and managed to place some photographs with magazines (back in the days of print). I share this up front so you'll know I've been around and used scopes for quite a while. I received a Celestron NexStar 8se package with 14 piece accessory kit and SkyPortal Wifi Adapter for Christmas less than a month ago, and the only way to do this review justice is to provide a play by play. Day 1: It arrives. I'm not sure why delivery drivers leave 2oz packages by the garage door and place packages you need a derrick to lift blocking the front door so you can't get out to get the package. The 8se comes in a BIG, HEAVY box (SENIORS PAY ATTENTION!). Unpacking. Open the outer box, open the inner box, and you're presented with four more boxes, some of which have even smaller boxes inside. There are instructions (not completely useless, not really helpful) which provide clues regarding which box to open first. If you love mysteries, you're going to love this. Quick Set-up Guide First, have the Instruction Manual handy and refer to it often. If nothing else, the pictures in the Quick Set-up Guide and Instruction Manual provide clues as to how things are suppose to work. When in doubt with the Set-up Guide, check with the Instruction Manual and vice-versa. Neither tells the complete story and each have different errors. Steps 1-5 Good Step 6 - First thing, our tripod didn't have a bubble. Looked and looked and looked and no bubble, no bubble, no bubble. Finally used the one from the Meade. Second, The tripod bubble level's only useful if you never plan on moving the telescope-tripod assembly from wherever you do your initial assembly. Move it outside, front yard to backyard, beach to desert, field to forest, and you need to take the mounting platform off the tripod to level it all over again. Note this: If you take off the mounting platform, the telescope comes with it unless you separate the scope from the mounting platform. Steps 14-15 - Yes, we're skipping. Steps 14-15 is where you put eight AA batteries in the mounting platform. Videos indicate this is easy. (SENIORS PAY ATTENTION) It isn't. You'll need strong fingers, strong nails, or a screwdriver to pop it off. Put these batteries in now because you'll have to work under or around the telescope if you wait until Steps 14-15 is suppose to occur. Further note - a fresh pack of batteries gives good use for ~30m then fades rapidly, especially if you're using the scope in winter (15-30ºF). We planned on getting the rechargeable power supply and ended up returning the entire unit and all accessories because, personally, I don't need the headaches. Step 7 - Notice in the picture the demonstrator's holding the scope and mounting platform together? The hitch here is they didn't include the step where you attach the scope to the mounting platform. The hitch with that missing step is you can't attach the scope to the mounting platform as the platform is configured coming out of the box The hitch there is you need to turn the mounting platform part that the scope slides into so you can slide the scope into it. The hitch there is it doesn't turn easy and, if you're like me, you're leery of turning something with a relatively precision motor attached. We called tech support. Turns out the mounting platform part is on a friction clutch and can be turned by hand. Really? (SENIORS PAY ATTENTION) This doesn't turn easy for people with a good grip, and next to impossibly if you have arthritis. Not to mention turning a precision gearing mechanism with a friction clutch by hand. Nobody told the engineers that's a perfect way to ruin the clutch assembly? Steps 8-13 - Good Steps 16-18 - Only useful if you plan on terrestrial viewing or know astrogation well enough to "point-and-shoot." Now we get to "Before you can begin observing, you must setup your hand control, align your finderscope and align your telescope. Step by step instructions are included in the following Hand Control Setup section." I'd already spent 2+ hours going through the various documentation (the Instruction Manual is a must), so figuring out the Hand Control Guide is the next day's job. Day 2: Aligning the finderscope and telescope. Before anything else, remember you have to mount the finderscope to the telescope to align them. Does anybody writing documentation know how to explain something step by step and explicitly? Remember those college science texts which showed step 1 and 2 then the solution and in between had "The derivation is left as an exercise for the student"? They may as well have had "And then a miracle happened!" Anyway, the people who wrote "The derivation is left as an exercise" also wrote the Celestron documentation. Got the finderscope attached. Now I had to find something ~1/4 mile away to properly align the finderscope to the telescope. Which meant taking the telescope, the mount, and tripod somewhere where I could clearly see a steady, non-moving terrestrial object which was ~1/4 mile away. Do you live in a suburban neighborhood? I ended up using a neighbor's window casing two streets away. Fair enough, but your suppose to get your target in the center of the finderscope which has no crosshairs so you have to be looking through the finderscope dead on while you make adjustments. (SENIORS TAKE NOTE) This can be straining if you have back problems and are 6' tall or more as you have to bend over to see dead on, and the moment to touch the adjustments the entire assembly jiggles so you have to wait for it to quell before making your next adjustment. Once you've got it in the finderscope, move on to the main scope, again with the "center," which again means you have to be viewing dead on. Yeah, I wasn't having fun yet. Hand Control Guide: First, does it work? Yes. Second, could it work better? Definitely. Third, does it work as simply and as easily as the documentation and videos indicate? No way, period! The menu system is extensive. It's also ONE LINE at a time on a horizontally scrolling LED display. Really? In 2025? Okay, chock this up to not getting the flying car I was promised, too. I had to work through the menus four times before I worked it properly. Now onto finding a bright sky object, center it in your finderscope, center it in your main scope, press this, press that, lather-rinse-repeat three times. The first night out I went through that menu system and found three objects three times over and each time got an alignment failed message. Okay, enough for one night. Bring everything inside and start again tomorrow. Day 3: I downloaded two pieces of software available from Celestron, CPWI and Starry Night. I installed and uninstalled Starry Night five or so times. Each time, despite reporting a successful install, Starry Night threw errors faster than I could dismiss them during loading. CPWI installed and loaded, and that leads us to the SkyPortal WiFi adapter module. It worked fine in "direct" mode, meaning it connected to the laptop and I could communicate with the telescope provided laptop and 'scope where within 5-15' of each other. However, it never worked with in wifi network mode, meaning I couldn't sit in my backroom, indicate what I wanted to view, and have that info sent to the 'scope in my driveway about 30' away even though the distance from each point to the router was less than 15'. The CPWI software lets you align your scope. Okay, and mine didn't. It couldn't find anything it suggested as an alignment point. The suggested points where in the sky, simply not where the CPWI software indicated they should be. The Hand Control alignment needs to be repeated each time you set up the scope. Say what? I have to go through a 15-20m procedure each time I want to look at something? The CPWI lets you save an alignment setting. Trouble there is it never aligned my 'scope properly. Days 3-15: I took the 'scope out nightly for about two weeks and repeatedly failed. I contacted Celestron for guidance and was on hold long enough for the sun to go nova. I emailed with my concerns. They sent me pages from the manuals. Day 16: I packed up the 'scope and returned it. By the way, during the repacking process I found the bubble level. About the size of a dime, and stuck in some bubble wrap.to work with the house wifi. It recognized it, indicated it connected, never did.

After finding out about this product in an Astronomy magazine ad, I decided to give it a try for my Celestron NexStar-4SE telescope (which I power with a Celestron external AC-to-DC power supply). I watched a couple of YouTube videos about this WiFi module and the SkyPortal App that works with it and was pleased with how I could control the NexStar-4SE telescope via the SkyPortal WiFi module that plugged into my telescope's Aux port and the App that I downloaded to my Android smartphone. At first I had difficulties getting the telescope aligned, but after I upgraded the red dot finderscope that came with my NexStar telescope to Celestron's StarPointer Pro finderscope, I found it easier to center bright stars in the telescope and achieve alignment. Note that the SkyPortal alignment process is different from the NexStar telescope's normal alignment process because SkyPortal requires aligning with three bright stars, not three bright objects (although using a bright object like the moon to manually align the finderscope with the view in the telescope eyepiece before doing the star alignment process helps, which one can do in Connect mode before running Connect and Align). After getting the NexStar telescope successfully aligned, the SkyPortal App that controls the telescope has some great features in the Search menu that enabled me to select celestial objects for the telescope to Go To from submenus including Tonight's Best, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and deep sky objects. These add-ons provided an enhanced celestial object observing experience (after your session, don't forget to turn off the finderscope red light switch so that you don't run out the battery).

It connected very easy! This, combined with the star sense autoaligner and Sky Safari (or Celstron Sky Portal app) makes for an incredibly easy, fun viewing experience. The only thing I would change is really more of a software thing. You have to stay within the apps, or it will lose connection with the app. That is, the wifi is still connected to your phone, but if you exit out of the app even for a second, it will need to reconnected and sometimes even need to repeat the alignment process. It is much smaller than what I expected. It looked bigger that the picture. Like the size of a slightly oversized USB thumb drive. Great! Buck for buck, this may be the best $100 for your telescope. Recommended!

Der WLAN Adapter für mein CPC 800 funktioniert "plug and play": in den AUX Port eingestöpselt, das vom Adapter neu aufgespannte WLAN mit dem Smartphone verbunden, Celestron Skyportal App oder Skysafari App gestartet und Teleskop verbinden: läuft. Einziger Nachteil: verbindet man sein Smartphone mit dem Celestron WLAN Adapter im "Direct Mode", kann man nicht mehr aufs Internet zugreifen. Da hilft nur der AP Mode: bei diesem verbindet man den Adapter in das bereits vorhandene WLAN bei sich zu Hause (oder unterwegs z.B. mit einem mobilen WLAN AP) und greift dann darüber auf den Adapter zu.

EASY OF USE

It took a little less than 5 minutes to have the wifi module running and that's because I was lazy and didn't want to make mistake. This accessory can in fact be completely functional in few seconds, from its box to the telescope port and Skyportal running. It is that simple. Just follow the few steps on the instructions coming with it and it will work its magic in an instant. I received the latest generation of this SkyPortal accessory and no firmware update seemed to be needed since it worked straight out of the box. Good wifi signal when connecting directly to it with an iPhone. The control response time is instantaneous. It is expensive for such a little piece of hardware but the freedom and functionality it provides is priceless. Control input from wifi device is as accurate as if it was running from the hand controller. And it is much more convenient. No wire, no hassle, and Skyportal interface is fun to use. I'm not deceived. Can't wait to get my 8SE outside tonight with my kids. Just make sure that an 8SE is installed forward enough on the rail so the focus knob don't get into contact with the module. I can almost reach zenith (85 degree up) with the 8SE 1.25" diagonal. Edit: I finally got out tonight with my 8SE equipped and its new Skyportal wifi. This device is a game changer. It hasn't faulted during the whole night, connection was strong and alignments were always spot on. It is so great to tap onto a clestial object in Skyportal app, hit goto and see the scope pivoting and aligning towards its target by itself. The freedom that this wifi device provides is priceless. My little girl thought it was a sorcerer trick when she saw her Jupiter on the phone screen and watch the scope align to it in real time when tapping GoTo. A nice educative tool.

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Ease of use and connection to WiFi good