Celestron's Origin and Other Smart Telescopes
A new type of telescope has made observing easier and accessible to a wider audience in a wider range of sky conditions. These scopes combine several modalities of previous scopes -- they consist of a small aperture telescope with a color camera that stacks short-exposure images and presents the final stacked image to the observer through a small screen built into an "eyepiece", through an app on the observer's phone, or through an app on their computer. These scopes are fully automated. They orient themselves and locate objects themselves, finding objects of interest from extensive databases. Some also offer opportunities to participate in collective campaigns to gather scientific data. This approach to observing is called electronically-assisted astronomy (EAA) and provides views that are better than those seen with the naked eye, even from suburban locations.
This month's speaker will be Richard Berry. Richard is an expert observer, a compelling speaker, a renown author, and the developer of a popular software package for astronomical image processing called AIP4Win. Richard has had a wonderful career in astronomy and we're extremely fortunate to have him in our club. He has been exploring this new type of scope for quite awhile now and it will be very interesting to hear what he has learned. His description of his presentation is below.
A new class of automated telescopes has lit the astronomical nightscape: the so-called "smart telescopes." These instruments consist of a mount, optics, built-in camera, integrated computer, and clever software. The observer controls the telescope through a Wi-Fi link and receives images taken by the telescope on a tablet or cellphone. The internal computer "reads" the images it takes, figures out where the telescope is pointed, then points to any place on the sky and starts taking and stacking images. I'll talk about the leading players in this class: the ZWO Seestar, the Unistellar eVscope, and the Celestron Origin.
About Richard Berry
Richard Berry has been an amateur astronomer since he got glasses in fifth grade and could see stars in the sky. He's earned an MSc degree in astronomy, designed rocket payloads, served as Editor of Astronomy magazine, and authored books about telescopes, observing, and image processing. For the last 18 months, he's been an Origin beta tester, helping to shake the bugs out of this great little 'scope's software.