New Telescope Ordered
The big news is on Sunday I ordered the new deep sky imaging smart telescope. As we are a day ahead of the USA, the company was closed on the weekend and so I'm waiting for the actual shipment day and to start tracking it with the tracking number.
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| Shipping route - as the manufacturer was not shipping to Taiwan, the telescope was ordered from USA stock, then slated for delivery to Asia Pacific. |
Samples show it does imaging amidst Bortle 9 light pollution with its own filtering system. I don't need to calibrate it on any star (no star needed unless it were for focus check). Plus, I don't need to buy any accessories though I do have some ideas for a solar filter kand making an attachment for filters.
The telescope is so high tech that I don't need to do anything at all except push a button. It calibrates automatically, recommends what to image, slews to the object, does centering, guiding, takes exposures, stacks the exposures, processes the image, and saves it. It has over a million star plate solving for every view in the telescope across the entire sky. Guys online say it tracks automatically, needs no guide scope, and it's better than many other systems, and takes about 3 minutes to set up. It's lightweight about 20 lbs, completely portable and appears to be the only telescope that will work from my obstructed balcony.
It's a novel solution for deep sky imaging across a Bortle 9.9 sky, usually with one star visible and a few planets. I believe results will be somewhat compromised by heavy light pollution but with the proper amount of image processing on raw images, we'll see about the minimall results. It will be a great experiment to see which objects can be extracted from a mostly white sky. With the fast f4 telescope and short focal length, this is definitely not a high resolution planetary solution and for that application I will use the f10 and f11 Celestron telescopes.
I'm already looking at a way to attach light pollution filters, and other filters, plus do many amazing experiments. A small compression lens will take it down to f2 or faster for example. Infrared and other filters like the Ha will have various effects on the atmosphere. It may be possible to get direct 2x or 3x for planets with a barlow attachment. On the other hand, it will be a joy just to use the telescope without any technical monkey business.
The telescope is so small and lightweight, it could be taken up on the mountain where much darker skies prevail. I'd love to image the Horsehead nebula and take in some of the dimmer galaxies. For now, the claims say you can get images of the Ring Nebula, the Whirlpool Galaxy, Orion Nebula, the Dumbell Nebula and others through light pollution. The telescope has electronic image correction for light pollution and I'll run tests on this to see the effectiveness relative to glass filters.
