Re: Unistellar eVscope 2 Telescope. Immersive Galactic Experience.

[Michael WADNESS <mjwadness verizon net>]

Hi All,

All of Ken’s points are valid and I have to admit ignorance on what a good 
telescope is. 

Just to add some insight from yesterday’s discussion, in addition to 
having a watch night, one of things we discussed is the possibility of 
setting the telescope up and be able to operate it remotely to collect 
data overnight.  Or if possible to program the telescope to take photos at 
a certain time at a certain location of the sky.  As wonderful as it would 
be to get students to come to a watch night, this might be more 
accessible.  And yes..the photos you can find online would be much better, 
but the students would be the ones collecting the data.  An example of an 
application might be take photos of Jupiter’s moons on multiple nights.  
Students then analyze the photos to measure the moons’ speeds and 
positions to measure the mass of Jupiter.  

Again, I don’t know telescopes well and I don’t know if this particular 
model could do what I just described.  But this might be a way to get more 
students involved that normally wouldn’t be able to attend a night watch 
party.

Mike



> On Feb 11, 2023, at 5:45 PM, Ken Olum <kdo cosmos phy tufts edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi, Tom, Per, all.  I think it would make sense to get a small telescope
> if people would like to arrange observing nights with school classes.
> But I'm not sure if this particular model (Unistellar eVscope2) is the
> right choice.  There is a continuum between looking at beautiful
> pictures taken by JWST and going outside and looking at the stars with
> your unaided eye.  This telescope is at a strange place in that
> continuum.  It has a photosensor that digitizes the image.  As far as I
> know, you cannot look through it directly.  There are a lot of good
> things about that.  It will give you a much deeper image, because it can
> integrate for longer than your eyes.  It has digital image processing.
> It avoids the problem where you can't usefully have low magnification
> with a large aperture telescope because the resulting beam of light from
> the eyepiece doesn't fit into your pupil.  But now you have to ask this
> question: If you're not pointing the telescope and you're not looking
> into the telescope, why are you outside in the cold?  For that matter,
> why have you set up your telescope in a lousy location like the Boston
> area instead of on top of a dark mountain?
> 
> This particular telescope has something even stranger: an electronic
> eyepiece, meaning that when you look through the eyepiece you aren't
> seen the light that came into the telescope but rather looking at a
> screen that displays the image that was recorded by the photosensor.
> Looking into telescope eyepieces is a pain.  The eyepiece is usually at
> an awkward angle and you have to crane your neck.  In this case, why not
> just look at your phone?  Unless I misunderstood something, the only
> purpose is to pretend that you are looking through the telescope.
> 
> The other issue is the price.  I understand we are not very price
> sensitive.  But it's worth noting that for the same price as this 114mm
> aperture telescope you could get this 406mm aperture telescope:
> https://www.skywatcherusa.com/products/sky-watcher-flextube-400p-synscan
> It might not be better: it depends on what you want to look at.  Large
> apertures like this are mostly useful for gathering a lot of light from
> dim, deep sky objects, which may be hard to see regardless if there is
> lots of light pollution.  And because of the iteration time, the
> Unistellar will probably let you see things that you couldn't see with
> your eye and the larger aperture.  But are you looking at them or at
> pictures of them?
> 
> Maybe the Unistellar would be great.  Take it outside, set it up, touch
> some object on your phone and every kid can see the image simultaneously
> on their phone.  But the issues above may be worth thinking about.
> 
>                                        Ken
> 
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