New telescope & camera - apparently going to disrupt/shake up astrophography!

[blinky]

I think this is the best section for this thread......

I just found out about these 2 projects.....

TinyMOS aims to be the GoPro of Astrophotgraphy! 

http://tinymos.com/

I cant see whats so special about it though! Looks to me like a small cmos sensor that takes C lenses. Cant see whats groundbreaking about it at all... it's not cooled and has no drive or tracking/guiding ability. To me it looks like it might be OK for lunar - they have a shot of the milky way on their facebook page but the chromatic aberrations and field curvature are terrible!

The second is a 3d printed Automated Robotic Observatory - Looks like a 3d printed Dobsonian! Not sure how this can be used for astrophotography either - they are working on a version with a 3.5 cm mirror but show an picture of one of their telescopes with an 8" mirror.  Surely by the time you buy an 8" mirror and print out the rest you would be as well to just buy a dob?  I also really cant see a 3d printer being able to produce accurate enough gears etc for decent long exposure photo's never mind that it looks like its a dobsonian mount system and would have field rotation even if it did track....

http://www.openspaceagency.com/

[blinky]

Or how about this: http://edgertronic.com/

18,000 frames a second affordable camera - seem to have a different definition of the word affordable than me though, from what I gather the smaller 700fps camera is $5,500...

[nmoushon]

I've seen both of these before. The camera more in recent days and the Dob has been seen (and mentioned here) a while ago. 

I don't think this camera is going to take off. It is not designed well enough for AP imaging that would beat the current DSLRs. It would have to be very cheap to be worth getting. And with DSLR bodies that are pretty cheap to begin with I think it will be hard to beat the price. The lenses are way to small for how fast they need to be to image without guiding, which in turn is adding a lot to how bad the CA and field curvature is. Also I'm sure it has a very high ISO which is why the images look grainy as well. With how thin it looks I have trouble seeing them putting a LCD on it. And if they do they are going to be compromising a lot of valuable space for that which they could've used for other features and tech. Basically I think they are turning a point-n-shoot pocket camera into a "AP camera". So it will be a pocket camera with really high ISO and exchangeable lenses and that are not up to the quality and design they need to be for proper AP imaging. Though it might interest a lot techy millennials out there with extra cash to spend on new tech....kind of like the iwatch...