Texts from your dog and brain-free astronomy: The best of the rest from CES It wouldn't be CES without the introduction of gadgets that no one asked for. The Register has already taken a look at odd CES gizmos this year, but those selections were hardly the only head-scratching hardware to show up in Las Vegas. Even electric cars – a big feature at this year's show – got in on the usual CES weirdness …
Its actually a machine to allow the Dog to train you. Press a button and you dispense treats. Press this button and time for walkies. Yes another and time "to see a man about a horse". If you respond in a timely manner and according to the correct button, the dog will make a big fuss over your as a reward.
Says a text from the pooch.
The interlocking FluentPet tiles/The Blockbusters board...
I keep thinking of getting an automated telescope mount but I would want one with an eyepiece so it didn’t rely on a bit of tech to get the views, but then in the east of England it is often cloudy for days on end so it would just sit there not getting used (nearest dark sky site is at least 30 minutes away.
So not for me I’m afraid although it does look nice they could put an eyepiece mount on it.
I was thinking along similar lines. How is this better than just looking at something like KStars or anything better than that? I think some of the "pro" star gazing apps use photos or photo-realistic imagery so it doesn't even matter if it's cloudy :-)
At least with an eyepiece you get an actual feeling of looking at something "for real", not just an image on a phone/tablet/leptop screen. I think the target market must be those people that go to pop/rock concerts or other special events and spend the whole time "watching" through a phone screen so they can have their own personal recording of the event (and proof they were really there)
I think it’s for taking photos.
I must admit I have a CCD eyepiece and a goto mount, and a carefully fettled Raspberry Pi so I can observe indoors on a 65 inch TV. Because the clearest nights are the coldest nights. Loads of people use setups like this, the idea is far from new. You can share near live images on the web. It’s not like astronomers are lesser astronomers because they book an observation from a robotic telescope on a mountain top in Tenerife or South America and collect their image next morning.
But Saturn just looks the same as the first time you saw it, and Jupiter, changes a bit and its Galilean satellites move about. Mars is very consistent . Nebulae don’t change much. Galaxies are fairly inert. The real variables are the observation conditions and the opportunities plus the occasional cometary visitor.
There's been computer software for telescopes with motorized mounts for a long time, some of which do auto position tracking over time, - unclear from blurb if its much better than some existing stuff...
Have seen plenty of scopes primarily designed for use with cameras etc. and so unless you swap out the camera you don't have a "human eye" hi mag view, again unclear from pics if possible to add on a camera or human viewfinder... Don't like the smooth look of it as seems no obvious point to add a low mag "finderscope" that you often use manually when selecting what you see (though if their idea is automatic everything maybe its deliberate).
As my scopes are old and basic (& am happy with that) I will never know as not the sort of thing I would buy (just a hobbyist, have some friends with pricey & complex kit, but with the vagaries of UK weather & family commitments I'm very much an occasional fair weather observer so cheap & cheerful manual kit for me (no motorized mounts etc.))
Ah, you are a sensible Solar observer?
Far more comfortable way to practise the hobby (just remember to wear a hat!).
Although it does have disadvantages. The filters are expensive and the equivalent to running a Messier Marathon is a bit boring "Target 1: got it! Finished!".
"cheap & cheerful manual kit for me (no motorized mounts etc.))"
I remember circuits for motor controllers in electronics magazines many years ago, probably ETI. I never really thought much about it or even why one would really be necessary until one time there was a lunar eclipse, the sky was clear, it was a warm summer night and I had my camcorder on a tripod (for cheap tape based camcorder, it has a remarkably powerful optical zoom!). I had to keep checking and adjusting the camera because on full zoom I could actually see the Moon moving across the field of view. Something I really knew about intellectually but had never seen or noticed in practice before that night.
Unless they had a massive change of heart from the previous version and their Kickstarter project, this telescope is very deliberately computerised only and digital camera only. No human eye involved - a simple Newtonian reflector, it doesn't even have a secondary mirror for an eyepiece - and no finder scope attachment.
Thunderfoot did a video review of the previous model - others did too but for a product like this his busting style fits well! Long and short: you can get better optics and automated mount, plus a camera, for a lot less (even this lower priced model). But then you have to learn how to use it and risk getting a new hobby.
The Unistellar does have some advantages from its design, because it doesn't support making any changes to the optics (like different eyepieces): it can be pre-focussed for the unchanging focal plane and can always use video star tracking to provide alignment correction. But whether that is worth the cost is debatable (software for all the functions - autoguide, tracking correction, stacking - has been around for ages)
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