Stars / Astronomy / Astrophotography / Telescopes / Astro

I think you're looking for what's called a Smart telescope

Try looking through this (see what I did again 😂)

Here's another smart telescope

https://venturebeat.com/ai/unistellars-ai-telescope-lets-you-view-galaxies-in-the-night-sky-from-the-city/
$2500 though

BUT - 37 million stars, and it can see more than 5,000 celestial objects that include clusters of lots of stars.

AND

It uses machine learning to get rid of the light pollution with what it calls Smart Light Pollution Reduction technology to reduce the blurriness of an image

On your smartphone, it gives you a 6.2-megapixel image resolution and a wide field of view

Couple of shots from the start of September. First time properly shooting the moon. Taken on a Sony a7 with a 200mm lens. Fairly chuffed with em.

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Good photos

Edit - I didn't read

So much more money tho'!

I've been watching a lot more vids on the Seestar. A lot of the astrophotography crowd seem to love it even tho' the image it kicks out is so tiny. Granted, the results are pretty nice but it seems to be geared towards social media posts as opposed to proper high resolution photography. I guess you get what you pay for.

If a new version were to come out that could output e.g. 5000 X 3500 pixels I'd be all fucking over it.

If it's got a good frame rate you can easily increase resolution beyond the CCD resolution. Simple explanation is:

1. Take a bunch of images which are all slightly misaligned
   
2. Upscale by a factor of 2 or 3 or whatever
   
3. Align all the images (as in, if there's a star in the image, align all the stars, not align the pixel grids)
   
4. Merge them
   
   

You need to have a bit of motion in the images so that the light sources aren't all perfectly aligned with the pixels but it's not difficult.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_shift

More practical article https://petapixel.com/2015/02/21/a-practical-guide-to-creating-superresolution-photos-with-photoshop/

Lovely clear night in Cornwall yesterday. Saw Starlink for the first time, doesn't really matter what you think of it, it looks mighty impressive.

That might work for a large target like the moon but not for a smaller one like a nebula. I'll check that out but I think the depth of field is fixed so you can't zoom in to targets and do as you suggest.

On a side note, it's not good for planetary observation, tho' there may be a software update to improve that shortly. It's great that you can use it for solar observation as well, it's a pretty versatile tool!

but that's how most of the pictures are made, you take thousands of images with a tracking telescope and then stack them and do loads of post processing.

Yeah, I understand how stacking works. My point is, AFAIAA, the field of view on the Seestar isn't able to resolve a small enough portion of the sky for you to combine images to make an image of (for example) the Orion nebula. Does that make sense? It's field of view is too large, it can't magnify that much.

You would be able to get a nice sized image of Andromeda because it's a fairly large object in the sky. You could probably tile four images together to get quite a large high resolution image.

I'm probably missing something, I am not an astrophotographer but very keen to understand what this machine's technical abilities/limitations are.

A fair proportion of deep sky objects are pretty big and would show up well with this sort of gear - emission and reflection nebulae, bigger galaxies and planetary nebulae for example. Smaller galaxies and planetary nebulae would probably be tricky, but they are perhaps less likely to be targets for the people the Seestar is aimed at.

I just downloaded the phone app so I can get a look at other people's images, it's very impressive for the money. Can't believe you can see the horse head nebula through it!

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Wow, that is impressive!

I'm sold. On the evidence of that image alone, I think I'll get one. 🤓

I saw the ISS fly over for the first time Friday evening

Very exciting. Didn't have a chance to see it through a telescope or binoculars or anything but that's for next time.

The BBC had a story with prize winning astrophotography, utterly amazing what can be done by earth based photography

While stacking has uses for decreasing noise it will not increase resolution.

That horse head nebula looks like a really tight crop from a wider frame shot.

It is cropped, yeah, and possibly even interpolated looking closely. Looks like a fine grain filter. The native resolution is my main gripe and the one thing that turns me off buying it. I've seen talk of a version 2 with a bigger sensor, that would get me even more excited.

You can't buy one for love nor money tho', sold out everywhere.

And I'm fully aware stacking won't increase resolution but thanks for clarifying anyway. 😋

The native resolution is my main gripe

its £500ish...

If you can find one. But yeah, cheap as chips. Buy two, twice the resolution. That's how it works, right? 👺

I obvs want the moon on a stick. 🥁

They're available to pre-order here. £100 deposit secures. I'm quite tempted, me and Mrs EB have been talking about a telescope for a while, joint Christmas present kind of thing

You should I reckon!

I can put money down on one here but the first batch have all been spoken for so nothing available until Q1 2024. I'm gonna wait until I can walk into a store and buy one, maybe by then there'll be a V2 with all the pixels!

V2 with all the pixels!

no there wont - lol

where?