My Review of Celestron AstroMaster 114 EQ Reflector Telescope

Originally submitted at Telescopes.com

If you're looking for a dual-purpose telescope appropriate for both terrestrial and celestial viewing, then the AstroMaster Series is for you. Each AstroMaster model is capable of giving correct views of land and sky. The AstroMaster Series produces bright, clear images of the moon and plane...

Celestron AstroMaster 114 EQ Reflector Telescope

Good beginner scope

By Rich from Sterling, VA on 12/22/2009

 

4out of 5

Pros: Strong Construction

Cons: Poor Finder Scope

Best Uses: Astronomy

Describe Yourself: Casual/ Recreational

This is a good beginner scope. This is the second telescope I have owned and I find that the construction and quality are much better than the previous telescope I had owned. This scope is steady once it is balanced and will stay were you point it. It is very difficult to get this telescope on target with the finder-scope and lens which comes with it. The field of view for the lens is much too small. This telescope needs to have a few lenses included to allow the user to line it up with a lower magnification/wider field of view and work your way up to higher magnification/narrower field of view. I can not figure out how the finder-scope is intended to work. (How can you use both eyes to line up the telescope?) I line it up on the object I want to look at and it is no where to be found. Only after playing with Dec and RA controls am I able to find what I am looking for and when I look through the finder-scope it looks like it is still lined up. I am a noob when it comes to using telescopes but in my opinion this telescope needs more lenses with a wider field of view and a much better finder-scope. My other scope had cross hairs and it was much easier to get it right on target. I am sure this should be easier to use but I just don't get it. Right now it is way too cold to spend much time with it so perhaps as the weather warms up I may have more time to spend on figuring this out and perhaps I will get the hang of it.

If you have an older computer the software which comes with the telescope may not work. I tried it on two computers and it would not run as it stated it needed a better video card than what I have.

Even though I have stated several issues I have found with the telescope, I am still convinced that it is a good telescope and am happy with my purchase. It gives you a lot of bang for your buck. Like I said I have not had a great deal of time with it yet but once I have more time I am confident I will be able to work through the shortcomings. I do plan to purchase more lenses for it and possibly a better finder-scope.

(legalese)

Eee PC | Easy to Learn, Work and Play

I received my Asus EEE PC 1002HA a few days ago and am trying it out now. It has Windows Live Toolbar installed in IE. I noticed the "Blog It" button on the toolbar and decided to set it up with my Blogger account. No guarantee that I will actually write more here but lets see if it is in my face when I am using the machine I may make use of it.

BTW: For the little bit that I have used the 1002HA I have to say I like it. I tried the 4G version of the EEE PC earlier and gave up on it in short order. I like to have a small device but I want to do a lot with it and the 4G did not fit the bill. It looks like the 1002HA may do the job. We will see after a few weeks.

Eee PC Easy to Learn, Work and Play

Update to my previous post regarding USB issues: I wiped the machine and started from scratch. I would have liked to know what the problem was but many times you just need to start all over again.

Overview
-------------------------
I bought a Western Digital External USB Hard Drive and was able to use it on my desktop without any issue. I then attempted to use it on my laptop and was presented with the "Found New Hardware Wizard." After reading hundreds of posts with a few claiming to have a solution, I found no solutions which would work, short of reinstalling Windows.

It was very frustrating reading many of the posts as most of the responses were asking for further information about the hardware when the poster knew it was a software issue or telling the poster how to initialize the drive. If the respondent had read the poster's question they would not have posted an unrelated answer as the drive needs to be recognized by device manager before it can be used in disk manager.

I am posting what I did to get my USB HDD to work however it is not a solution to the underlying problem. If anyone knows how to fix the underlying problem please post a reply here. In the meantime I hope this helps other who have been searching for a fix for connecting a USB device which uses Windows default drivers but Windows prompts the user with the "New Hardware Found Wizard."

Troubleshooting Steps
-------------------------
- Rule out the hardware
+ Checked that the HDD worked on another PC
+ Used VMWare to ensure that it worked on the Laptop's hardware
- Used Goggle to search on the issue & checked a few things which made sense but were correct in my case
+ Checked that the Cryptographic Services was running
+ Checked the registry entry for the path of drivers (I do not recall the registry path but the value was %SystemRoot%\Inf;...)
+ Other things such as the location of files and others that I do not recall

Workaround
-------------------------
I found one post at http://www.ureader.com/message/1083780.aspx, which led me to try copying the registry entry from a working machine to the laptop. When I copied the registry entry from the machine which worked to the one which did not, the HDD worked. As I said earlier this really does not fix the problem but did get the HDD working.

Steps
- Using Device Manager I looked for the device under "Other Devices". Right clicked on the Unknown device and selected properties. In the properties dialog, viewed the "Details" tab and noted the "Device Instance Id". In my case, the "Device Instance Id" was "USB\Vid_1058&Pid_0705&MI_00\6&344189D4&0&0000" for a Western Digital Elite 500GB USB Hard Drive.
- On the working machine, I opened regedit and went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\Vid_1058&Pid_0705 and exported the registry
- Copied the exported registry entry to the laptop and attempted to import it into the registry but ran into some permission issues and was unable to update the registry
- Opened regedt32 on the laptop and gave Everyone full access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\Vid_1058&Pid_0705 and imported the registry file, which worked fine this time
- Removed the full control access for the Everyone group
- Connected the HDD and it worked as expected

Summary
-------------------------
I was very frustrated at finding no solutions to fixing the issue of Windows not using the default drivers for hardware such as USB Hard Disk Drives (HDD), USB Hubs, USB Keyboards, etc. I decided to write this post to help others who may be very frustrated as well and ask if anyone knows what the underlying problem is and has a solution please follow up with a solution.

Thank You
Rich