Now my question is (for those who knows things with telescopes in and out). Do you think that telescope is going to deliver what they are promising it to deliver?
Because if it actually are delivering what they are saying it does, then i think that will be the telescope to buy.
Well, from the looks of it, it’s not really a telescope, but a live camera. It can be useful to see things through the visor or an app, but the images will never have the quality of a true telescope and the use beyond “look, see this” is missing.
So probably it delivers what it says: to see live objects whcih are too faint to see through naked eye, plus the auto-pinpointing and the tagging system and so. But can’t really photograph them, you can’t tinker with different magnifications and in the event that you are interested in planets, it raealy won’t magnifiy them a lot (they claim it’s 50x/100x/150x, but with a fixed optic setup, that’s 50x multiplied 2x and 3x with digital algorythms).
FAI, take Jupiter:
These images are a realistic rendition of what you’ll see with bare eyes through an actual telescope, which can gather enough light so you see the bands. The eVscope is really small in aperture so it probably won’t get any better than this even with the intensification algorythms (which essentially multiply light, but if the sensor doesn’t picks enough color, the intensification won’t work very well so you’ll just get a brighter greyish blob). And as for photography, the eVscope haves an altazimutal mount and that’s a no-no for photography. It is impossible to track properly an object with an alt-az mount so anything you tried to picture just wouldn’t stay steady enough. But then, they don’t claim it is useful for photograpy and very probably objects will micro-drift through the visor as the mount tracks them.
To keep this short, it is (potentially) a educational and interesting toy, but doesn’t haves any kind of potential to be anything else. You will see objects and that will be it. For anything more serious, a true telescope will be necessary. BTW, the “1000 times more powerful” refers to the brightness of objects it can display by artifically intensifying the image. This means that they claim they can display objects with a magnitude of 16 with a setup that shouldn’t show anything fainter than magnitude 13.
PS: on the tracking issue, you’d need an equatorial mount. It’s a kind of mount that allows the telescope to rotate around the celestial north in the same way as objects do, so rather than move up/down and left/right, it circles around the same circle as the object does. Nowadays motorized mounts are commonplace and many have auto-aligning so you just need to put them roughly pointing north and the mount’s computer will find the celestial north and start tracking.
Now, this telescope is far away from being released yet, so they can still make alot of changes to the telescope. It wont be released before November next year. And with the Kickstarter funding they now have, i do believe they will do more improvements on it before they release the final version of it.
