The new generation of smart telescopes now available from BINTEL are a bit like the mobile phone in your pocket.
There’s nothing in your phone that we didn’t have in past decades. Sure, the phone itself was no longer wired to the wall in your phone or office when the first mobile phones became popular the 1990’s. Digital cameras and music players were available in the early 2000’s. You could even buy electronic diaries and portable game consoles. But it’s the convergence of all of these technologies plus much more into small, mobile smartphones that’s changed the way we work and relax.
There’s probably nothing you can do with a Vaonis Vespera or Unistellar eVscope that you can’t do with a conventional telescope, mount, camera, several cables and a PC or notebook to run various bits of software. They way these new smart telescopes integrate everything together into a single, easy to handle package will make astronomy accessible to a new audience of astronomers.
Here’s some of the tasks that the integrated systems of smart telescopes handle automatically.
Alignment
All smart telescopes from BINTEL automaticallyd track objects in the night sky. There’s no need to align a smart telescope so it knows where it’s pointing. Polar Smart telescopes automatically align themselves by looking at the stars they see in front of them, taking a quick snap and work out where they’re pointed from the pattern of stars it sees. (This is sometimes called “plate-solving”.) You also won’t have to worry about polar aligning these telescopes.
Finding objects
To move to an astro object, you simply need to tell the telescope’s app what you’d like to capture or view. It will then move to that astro object and once there, keep track of it. Smart telescopes have an extensive catalog of objects in their database and this is being updated constantly.
Capturing raw data from the telescope.
Deep space astro objects need multiple long exposures to bring out faint, hard to see details. Conventional astrophotography systems need you to plan just how long these exposures will be and how many are needed for best results. The smart telescopes apps save you the hassle of handling this image capture and let you concentrate on learning about the objects you’re observing and extending your knowledge of the night sky.
Processing and sharing the images
Once data is captured by your telescope, you would normally need to process it further. This is not editing or changing the original astro images, rather it’s series of processes and techniques to highlight and show details in your images. Smart telescopes handle this entire process for you without the need to use complex software programs. If you’d still like to process images yourself, you can transfer files from smart telescopes yourself.
Gallery
The smart telescope apps have their own gallery feature where you can store, sort, and catalog your astro images. They’re also great for sharing astro images, either with friends or family or posting to social media.
Real Science
The Unistellar smart telescopes in particular lets you get involved with real science as part of their Unistellar Network. You can read more about this here.