Deep Sky Webinar

[Alan Thomas]

I very much enjoyed the latest Deep Sky Webinar – I watched it on YouTube this evening. Time travel was especially exciting! Thanks to all involved.
Alan

[Andy Wilson]

I found Mark Stuart’s “Exploring the cosmic tapestry” very entertaining. Chris Lee’s talk on Electronically Assisted Astronomy wetted my appetite for giving this a go. I like the idea of a telescope that can be quickly and easily setup and controlled from indoors.
Andy

[Alan Thomas]

Andy. After a couple of years as a Unistellar user (other makes are available), I can highly recommend it.
Alan

[Grant Privett]

Is there any monochrome option for the camera used?

[Robin Leadbeater]

Perhaps with these smart telescopes a swap out for a mono sensor might be feasible ? I used to do this kind microsurgery on webcams back in the day but my eyes and hands are not up to that now and I expect the pins are much closely spaced. If it uses a separate off the shelf camera module it might be possible though if there is a mono version. (Plus a firmware hack to get at the raw image before debayering)

With the Unistellar, being an open tube you can get in to put filters (or even a diffraction grating) in front of the camera

[Andy Wilson]

The Celestron Origin is another interesting entrant to the market. I wonder if they might offer a B&W version of the camera in future as it has a filter drawer. The filter is for light pollution filters.
Richard Berry is trying the Origin out for variable star photometry. There is the opportunity to use the green channel as with DSLRs, or all the light, depending on the goal of the observation.
The HOYS Citizen Science Project are accepting observations from ZWO Seestar 50mm telescopes, these use a colour CMOS chip. This is a research project run by Dirk Froebrich at the University of Kent, to monitor young stars.
Both of these approaches use the raw files saved by these smart-telescopes, rather than the processed images displayed on smartphones and tablets.
Andy

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by Andy Wilson.

[Dr Paul Leyland]

Grant, quick question: why do you want a monochrome camera on this kit?

I can answer why I might find one attractive: I like doing photometry in standard wavebands and also like capturing every possible photon for faint object detection and/or astrometry. I am not very interested in taking pretty picture.

Paul

[Grant Privett]

To see fainter faster and allow a V band filter to be put on the front, thereby supporting photometry.

[Grant Privett]

The Celestron Origin, a 6″ RASA is a bit more expensive though…

[Andy Wilson]

Both the Celestron Origin and Unistellar eVscope 2 are advertised at around £4,000. A lot more than the ZWO SeeStar S50 and DWARF II which are just over £500. Not too surprising given the Celestron and Unistellar have significantly larger apertures.

[Robin Leadbeater]

Andy Wilson wrote:

Richard Berry is trying the Origin out for variable star photometry. There is the opportunity to use the green channel as with DSLRs, or all the light, depending on the goal of the observation.
The HOYS Citizen Science Project are accepting observations from ZWO Seestar 50mm telescopes, these use a colour CMOS chip. This is a research project run by Dirk Froebrich at the University of Kent, to monitor young stars.
Both of these approaches use the raw files saved by these smart-telescopes, rather than the processed images displayed on smartphones and tablets.
Andy

These ideas might attract people into scientific applications of their kit but these solutions are pretty suboptimal. It reminds me of the days of converting webcams for deep sky imaging. The results were impressive given the limitations of the kit but far from what came after based on the huge interest in imaging it generated. Hopefully the smart scope manufacturers might see there is a market for mono sensors which can take filters. ZWO should be perfectly placed to do this for example as their SeeStar uses the same CMOS sensor in colour version as another of their cameras which uses the mono version (There are apparently already people using Star Analyser on the front of this scope and even hacking into it to mount it internally, though the colour sensor is a big drawback)

There are other examples of areas where there is a tension between what is good for (marketing to) imagers and not for science. For example fancy mulit-coatings which make the difference between 95 and 98% are a disaster for short wavelength measurements.

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