Buzzard75

I don't have a wheel and I don't have filters. Once a month we go out to our dark sky site with the club. Even if we're lucky and the skies are clear on that one particular night, I still may only have a couple of hours that I can actually capture anything. So I'm extremely limited on time. I understand that shooting with a mono and filters is obviously going to provide better results than OSC. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is how it can be faster. Can you shoot shorter exposures with mono than you need to with OSC (say 60 second exposures of R, G, and B each instead of 180 second OSC) or can you get away with 1/3 of the frames (20 or less frames each of R, G and B vs. 60 OSC)? That's the only way it could be faster.

I'm looking at the ZWO ASI183MC Pro, the QHY183C and the Altair Hypercam 183C V2. I'll be curious how you get on with the ZWO as I've seen what Trevor from Astro Backyard can do with the Hypercam. I'm going OSC because the time I have to image is extremely limited. I need to be able to capture as much data as I can in a few hours when I do have the opportunity. Going back out and doing the same object repeatedly just with another color filter on a mono cam is not an option for me. I'd never get a complete data set or very few complete data sets. I understand this is how the best images are achieved, but the images I'll be taking are just for me and to share on my club Facebook and Instagram pages. I'm not a professional by any stretch of the imagination. Still, I would like a better camera than the DSLR I already have. The only telescope I currently have is a dob and I use my DSLR and a barlow for doing planetary and lunar imaging. I have plans to get an equatorial mount and a refractor in the near future once I save up some funds. I thought that maybe I could buy the camera now, use it for planetary and lunar in my dob, and maybe borrow a mount and small refractor from my club, just to get used to the camera before I get my own setup. I intend to move from planetary and lunar into DSO's when I get my setup.

I brought up the processing of the images of the Stellina on the eVscope Kickstarter page a while ago. People were trying to compare the images saying that the Vaonis Stellina was better. No one seemed to catch on until recently when someone else pointed out the diffraction spikes. There could be some mounting device in the optical path that is causing them, but they still appear to be processed even to my untrained eye. Some don't seem to believe this type of scope will be good for outreach, but I disagree. You just have to be able to manage expectations of the public and explain the differences between a video astronomy/astrophotography setup and that of a standard telescope. Having this setup next to a large aperture dob or SCT and then a smaller reflector and refractor will really show the public what the capabilites of the different types of setups are and what to expect if they choose to get into the hobby. Everyone has seen the images of Hubble and these scopes in no way compare and that will be obvious to anyone who looks through them. What they do though, is show people the kinds of things that are really out there and continue to increase the interest in astronomy. And that is the whole point to public outreach. Educate, increase interest and inspire.

I'm not a photography guy, but here's the way I think of it. Take a short tube and put it up to your eye. If you were to take a picture, the actual image that you see, not including the tube walls, is what will be focused onto your sensor. It will take up the entire sensor. Now take a much longer tube. Your field of view is much more narrow, right? Again, the actual image you see at the end of the tube is what will take up the entire sensor. While the image with a longer tube will appear larger, you're not really magnifying anything. You're just limiting the field of view and focusing it down to more of a point. The actual magnification happens in the eyepiece where it takes that focused point and spreads it out and magnifies it.

I'm going to give it a go. I completely agree that if one part fails, the whole thing fails. However, if you build a system yourself when one thing fails, your whole AP/VA system fails until you get it fixed as well. It's not like you can do AP/VA without a camera or a PC. Are the components easily replaceable by the user? Yes, but you still have to have something to replace it with or just be down until you get it fixed. We'll just have to wait and see what the customer support/service is like if something ever happens *knock on wood*. As for the FOV, depends on what you call wide and what sort of magnification setting you're using, since the magnification is variable (50/100/150). I would assume the magnification is digital rather than optical given the construction of the telescope as you can't really change the focal length. You're right, it's not a very large scope. It's a 4.5" primary and a 450mm focal length. It uses a Sony IMX224, 1.2MP sensor and has a micro-OLED display. You wouldn't be able to get the entirety of Andromeda, Orion or even the Rosette nebula, but there are a lot of smaller galaxies and nebulae that will fit extremely well in the eyepiece. Is it hardware future proof? No. I can't imagine you'll be upgrading the sensor or the display. Software wise though, it's all controlled by an app on your phone which should be easy enough to update. I imagine there would be a way to flash the software on the telescope itself as well, if necessary though. They obviously haven't released full details as the entire project is still in development. You can certainly build a similar system, however, I doubt you'd be able to get anything quite as compact as this. And you really need to compare apples to apples when looking at cost. You'd have to get a scope, a tracking EQ or Alt/Az mount with a tripod, a camera, a power supply, a PC, and the software and cables to hook it all up and run it and process the images in real time. And you'll probably also need a guide scope and camera for that as well. You're probably looking at a $1750 (or £1300) at least. And that's just for barebones, no frills, small scope, low end tech specs and it's going to be a lot of stuff to carry around. Yes, Kickstarter's are generally a throw of the dice, but you really need to look at who's involved and how it's being managed and make a sound judgement from that. With SETI throwing their name on it, with all the publicity that it has right now, all the tech demos they're doing, and with the people who are managing it and their credentials on the line, it seems pretty legit.

I've gone in on the Kickstarter. Is it new tech? No. Is it revolutionary? Not really. What it is though, is an interesting concept using existing tech (i.e. telescope, camera, PC, and software) for live viewing of DSO's all repackaged into a single, easy to setup unit with the added twist of augmented reality and connection to a scientific research network. If a 16" dob is the visual observers version of a high end astrophotography/video astronomy setup, this is the desktop dob version. It's all about convenience and ease of setup and some people are willing to pay for that. I'm not willing to pay the $2000+ figure that's being thrown around in some places, but getting in early on a Kickstarter means you pay about half that. That's a bit more reasonable and it helps fund future developments in the tech. Oculus Rift started as a Kickstarter, and look at them now. One of the leading developers in VR technology. For me, the primary purpose of this telescope system will not be personal, however, I'm sure I will enjoy the views. I still love my 12" dob and get way better views that most of the people in my club from the dark site. The primary purpose will be outreach programs and public events with my astronomy club and to engage those people and increase their interest in astronomy and science. We hold events where we typically have anywhere from 50-100 people show up. I get a ton of oohs and ahs when I show them Jupiter or Saturn at 300x, and I get a few wows when looking at M57. But I also get a lot of questions like "what am I supposed to be seeing?" or comments like "I just can't see it" or children (and adults) who are less than impressed with an extremely faint fuzzy splotch of a galaxy or other nebulae. I can see them in my 12" and I'm impressed with what I can see because I know and understand what I'm looking at, but not everyone is. This is the telescope for those people. As our wallets are painfully aware, getting an image from a telescope to a PC screen with a high end AP/AV setup can easily cost way more than $2000 and requires a lot more components and setup. Besides that, I have enough junk to lug around and setup with my dob. If this thing collapses to fit in a backpack to where I can just pull it out, put it on a tripod, turn it on and it just work, all the better. I'm way more likely to use this in conjunction with my dob than I am to setup both my dob and an AP/AV setup for those community events. If it's just me or a club only event, or I plan to be out all night, that's a different story. That's my two cents on this.