What is the difference between the StarDate GPS Adapter and the CN-16 ?
The CN-16 is a GPS receiver accessory offered by Celestron to add GPS capability to their telescopes that have an AUX port but are not factory-equipped with GPS. The CN-16 is a proprietary GPS receiver design, and can only be used with your Celestron telescope. The StarDate GPS Adapter is just that: an adapter that will let you use any handheld GPS receiver (Garmin, Magellan, etc) to add GPS alignment capability to your telescope. If you already have a handheld GPS receiver, you don’t need to buy an expensive proprietary GPS receiver for your telescope. If you don’t yet have a handheld GPS receiver, you may wish to consider buying one and a StarDate GPS Adapter instead of a CN-16, because you can use the GPS receiver for hiking, navigating in the car, boating, geocaching, etc. The Celestron CN-16 accessory does include a magnetic compass direction sensor that is used in some alignment methods (specifically “GPS Align” on the NexStar series). The StarDate GPS Adapter does NOT have a dir
