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- Hacker News
- Ed Ting recently had a good video "Let's Overreact!! Smart Scopes Take Over? Chinese Products are the Best? Astronomy is Dead!?":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYJwgEwxG-U
If you want to get into astronomy, he has a few good beginner advice videos:
* 101 books/binoculars/telescopes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IlmekWsEAQ
* some more books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhbAEx2le7o
by throw0101d - Can confirm, they're a lot of fun. Especially for the person who wants minimal setup fuss and just to snap some pictures of the heavens.by _joel
- I have a Dwarflab DWARF 3 (also mentioned in the post) that I highly recommend. It’s one of those gadgets that ended up using more than expected when I bought it. I toss it in my luggage and I got to capture really nice sky pictures with little effort (Marfa TX, Patagonia, latest total solar eclipse in Spain)by dmarcos
- I have a high-end rig and this one. I use this one way more frequently due to the simplicity of the setup. You are capturing light in no time and it does not weight a ton. As long as you are conscious about its limitations, it’s a fun gizmo if you like astronomy or enjoy astrophotography.by cuasijoe
- I've never understood astrophotography. It's like taking pictures of the Mona Lisa with a Gameboy camera. Unlike real photography which is dynamic and ever changing, the night sky has remained the same since our ancestors first looked up.
Why not just download HD scans from the pros especially if you're going to "automate" the hobby portion of the field.
Can I just simulate the user interface a smart telescope uses and then just return Hubble photos after some artificial loading screen completes? Maybe toss in some whirring noises?
by thallium205 - There is something fundamentally different about actually looking at Jupiter... The image might be faint, imperfect ... But it is live.
The astrophotography/live viewing split in astronomy is interesting. For me, the whole reason I do backyard astronomy is to find the objects myself and observe directly, to the point where even using an app like Stellarium feels a bit like cheating.
by zelos - If I understand correctly, this is only used for astrophotography? You can't actually view through it with your bare eyes? That, to me, was the main reason to buy a reflector/refractor telescope; to receive the actual light of a planet (okay actually the suns light bouncing off the planet) bouncing through a bunch of mirrors, lenses and eyepieces back into your own eyes. The first time finding and seeing Saturn and Jupiter with my own eyes was amazing.
- I've been slowly (slowly....) working on an open source version of what the Seestar provides - a 3D printable shell, easily sourced mechanics and optics, open source electronics (3D printer controller boards are fabulous here). I love the idea of smart telescopes, but I also hope and believe that someday we'll have an open source equivalent to the easy entrypoint of, say, the S30.
Maybe I'm being too much of a purist because late model smart telescopes now allow you to grab the raw FITS files so the relative value of a fully open ecosystem is lower, but I'm trying to build towards the motivated teenager segment: someone who maybe has a Seestar or has seen one, and wants to have that experience, but wants to own it themselves and actually understand what's happening. I have the mechanics mostly working in Alt-Az mode, EQ mode is currently accomplished using a hinged plywood board fashioned into the world's shittiest polar alignment wedge, and now I'm working on figuring out how/where to source good enough optics. I have already learned a whack-ton designing the thing, and I hope that in the future the build will be interesting and informative enough for others to get a bunch of experience in Astrophotography for very little money.
You can buy the sensors used in a lot of these telescopes for <50USD on Aliexpress, the drive mechanics and electronics are ~80, and then all you should need (hopefully) is a cheapo Raspberry Pi 3 or equivalent, putting the total BOM at under 200 bucks. I'm hoping that by early next year I'll have something presentable and we can start building an open source ecosystem to compete with these very impressive but very heavily integrated instruments.
by nameless912