Jupiter and Saturn meet in the sky… it’s a conjunction! Their closest appearance will be right after sunset today, December 21st, 2020. Here’s the view 10 days ago on December 10th and they’re about the moon’s width apart:
December 20th, 2020
Clouds obscured the view off and on Monday evening (Dec. 21st), but it was still visible at times:
December 21st, 2020
Here’s the view through an 8″ Schimdt-Cassegrain type telescope on the 20th:
Three-exposure composite, December 20th, 2020
I combined three different levels of exposure above to mimic what you see with your eye through the telescope because a single camera exposure just blows out Jupiter and Saturn to make the moons visible. (Note the view is also inverted left to right in a Schimdt-Cassegrain telescope due to the final angled mirror in the light path.)
Here’s video of all three nights through the telescope:
Video of the conjunction over three nights, through my 8″ SCT telescope
Darlene and I went out last night near the Truckee airport to see the comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE). It’s currently relatively close to the sun so it’s not visible in the sky for very long before sunrise or after sunset. It is visible to the naked eye but not super obvious – you have to know where to look for it. It looks most impressive with binoculars or a telephoto lens on a tripod (and a few seconds exposure). In a telescope, you won’t see most of the tail as it’s quite long!
It’s likely to get brighter over the coming week as we get to our closest approach July 22nd, though it’s also possible it’ll break up. It’ll appear higher in the sky (and further from the sun) as the month progresses. July 20th will be nice too as it’ll be a dark new moon setting with the sun and the comet will be higher in the sky after dark
Here’s more info on where/how to look.
I received my eVscope from Unistellar in January of 2020 and I thought I would share my thoughts and experiences with it – particularly since there wasn’t a lot of info available when I ordered it in back in July of 2019. I’ve since been adding to this page to provide additional information.
The Unistellar eVscope is quite different from a traditional optical telescope. It’s a highly integrated and automated digital imaging telescope that enables you to easily find and view deep sky objects in color and detail that would not normally be perceptible to your eye looking through a normal optical telescope. In addition, the eVscope is designed to let you easily participate in and contribute data to crowd-sourced “citizen science” projects.
The eVscope is a 4.5-inch Newtonian reflector that captures light on a highly sensitive, low noise Sony IMX224 color sensor while using a motorized alt-az tracking mount and autonomous field detection to automatically identify, align and continually track its view of the sky. Integrated image-processing software takes and combines an on-going series of short exposures to generate an image in almost real time that brings out much of the very low light, color and detail that’s not visible to the human eye even when looking through a normal telescope. This view accumulates over just seconds and minutes and is displayed both in the telescope’s eyepiece (on an OLED display) as well as on a WiFi-connected smartphone. The whole thing is self-powered via an integrated 9-10 hour rechargeable battery, fits into a large backpack and weighs just under 20 lbs. including the provided tripod.
In other words, it’s quite an impressive level of integration!
While you can of course outfit a normal telescope and tracking mount of your choosing with the necessary cameras, computer, tracking and image stacking software, WiFi connectivity, battery power, etc., you then also have to develop the expertise to use and troubleshoot this software – and it’s not trivial. To be clear, the eVscope is not really designed to be a sophisticated imaging tool or to compete with the results you can eventually get with lots of practice and expertise and many hours of capturing and processing images. Instead, the eVscope is intended to let you very easily see and enjoy much more detail than you can with a normal, unaided telescope and it provides quick setup, ease of control from your smartphone, and a fun, real time viewing experience all wrapped up in a lovely, convenient little package.
It is however not cheap to integrate all these components into such a convenient package. As such, I wouldn’t recommend it for someone wanting to dip their toe into astronomy on a small budget. It’s pretty clear though that this makes for a wonderful tool for astronomy outreach programs anywhere and I’m really looking forward to sharing the experience with friends and their families.
I recorded a video to demonstrate the ease of setting up and using the eVscope:
I forgot to record using the focus ring on the base of the scope, so perhaps I’ll add that later, but Unistellar provides a nice page detailing how to use it with the provided Bahtinov mask: How to use the Bahtinov mask? (It’s great how the mask is integrated into the cap!)
With the earlier version of software (version 0.9), I did encounter a lot of bugs but most of these have already been addressed in version 1.0 (April 2020). And now it’s performing even better in version 1.1 (October 2020). They’ve also made many improvements over just this year and added functionality that makes the eVscope an even more fun and amazing experience to share with people.
The ease of setup and the speed with which you can get to viewing objects is great. I really like the convenient size of the thing, including the integrated power supply and the optional padded backpack to carry and protect it. The initial star alignment process is super fast (around 30 seconds) and it’s autonomous field detection system seems to do a great job of tracking the sky and dealing with field rotation over several hours. I did find the views appear slightly soft (presumably from the effort to track, align and integrate frames over many minutes) but still quite enjoyable, and perhaps this will improve with future updates. You can see some sample images below. I should note that I haven’t tried collimating the scope yet, so I’ll update here when I get the chance. Update (April 2020): I finally had both time and a bit of clear weather to collimate the telescope and it turns out it was off a little but now well aligned. Over time I’ll try to replace all the images in the gallery with new ones post-collimation. So far it’s just the last few in the gallery that were taken after collimation. (Whirlpool Galaxy, Ring Nebula, Eagle Nebula)
Another aspect of the very quick and easy setup is that it takes less than a minute to pull out the scope on a whim, stand it up on the open patio outside my bedroom, remove the cap, turn it on and dash back inside out of the cold winter night, and settle in with my phone or iPad and mess around exploring the sky, in warmth and comfort. I definitely cannot set up and align my 8” SCT and german equatorial mount so quickly and easily even with the auto-align accessory, plus there’s setting up cameras, laptop, myriad power and USB cables, etc. Not to forget to mention the disassembly and take down time afterwards again!
That said, I don’t think you should think of the eVscope as astrophotography gear. Everything is integrated to make it easy to observe deep sky objects with color and detail you can’t see without the aid of sensors, but it does not provide the means to capture frames and do your own stacking or more sophisticated and detailed imaging with a non-color sensor and color filters, etc. I would not expect this telescope to compete with custom gear where you have control over everything (and of course have to learn how to do everything). That is not the purpose of its design. Similarly, the cost reflects the benefits of integrating all these pieces (sensor, tracking software, stacking/imaging software, display, power supply, etc) into a small and elegant package without any cables or separate components to manage while also making it dead simple to use. That’s what you’re paying for and that’s the trade-off.
As of February 2020, the provided documentation was pretty good in some areas but a little weak in others. For example, I was surprised how long it took me to find a little blurb buried in a list at the back of the printed guide that explained how to tell if the battery was fully charged.
As of May 2021, the provided online documentation is much improved. I don’t know what has changed with the printed instructions since I received my scope back in January of 2020, but there’s plenty of information now available from their online knowledge base and more and more questions are getting answered over time.
As I mentioned above, the eVscope is also designed to participate in crowd-sourced “citizen science”, in partnership with the SETI Institute. As per their web site, the eVscope “allows users around the world to participate in observing campaigns to image and collect data on objects of special interest to researchers. In Campaign Mode, image data is automatically sent to a data repository at the SETI Institute’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. The international scientific community can then access unprecedented volumes of image data for specific objects, from thousands of telescopes around the world, at different dates and times. This in turn, can enable new discoveries and enhance our understanding of the universe around us.”
In early February 2020, I had the opportunity to participate in one of these observing sessions. I received an email providing instructions for a particular target and observing time to collect data on an exo-planet transit of “WASP-43b”. The procedure involved setting up beforehand, selecting and confirming the target and then starting the Enhanced Vision capture process and letting it run autonomously for several hours as it tracked the target. Afterwards there was the capturing of 30 seconds of “dark frames” and then initiating the download of data from the telescope followed by the upload to their servers. While I encountered a few issues along the way (included in my bug list below), it was fun to get to participate in a data gathering session like this.
Here’s a more recent example of results from a “citizen science campaign” I was able to participate in. This was an effort to detect occultation by a Jupiter Trojan asteroid (“Palinurus”) on May 27th, 2021:
Here’s a couple of real time recordings of the Unistellar app showing the live view from the eVscope of the Orion Nebula (over 3.5 minutes) and Bode’s Galaxy (over 6 minutes):
Here are some images illustrating the views you can generate and enjoy in just minutes with the eVscope. I’ve included both screenshots of the full image displayed on my phone as well as the circular cropped image that it produces for display in the eyepiece and that it allows you to save from your phone. (The eyepiece shows only the circular cropped image and it does not display the descriptive text or circular outline.) I have not done any further processing on these images – these are just as they were originally generated by the eVscope app or screenshot-captured off my phone. (Originally, the eVscope app would only save the circular cropped version, but now the app will let you save the full uncropped version.)
The Sony IMX224 Exmor CMOS color sensor used in the eVscope has a resolution of 1305 x 977. The images saved from the eVscope app are 1280 x 960 and the circular cropped images are 1080 x 1080.
Click on any image below to see the full size version and to browse the gallery:
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Flame Nebula NGC 2024 |
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Running Man Nebula NGC 1977 |
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Bode’s Galaxy M81 |
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Orion Nebula M42 |
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Eagle Nebula M16 |
Andromeda Galaxy M31 |
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Whirlpool Galaxy M51 |
Lagoon Nebula M8 |
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Eastern Veil Nebula, NGC 6992 |
Ring Nebula, M57 |
I’ve decided to upgrade to the newer eVscope 2 and so my original eVscope is now up for sale. I’m asking $2000, including the Unistellar backpack. Contact me via email: (chris “at” crimdom “dot” net).
It’s really great that Unistellar is obviously listening to its users and has been steadily improving the software for the eVscope. Many of my own issues and feature requests have already been addressed.
Here’s my feature requests as of May 2021 (both current and previously implemented), using version 1.3 of the Unistellar app, running on iOS 14 (iPhone 12 Pro and an iPad Pro):
PLEASE NOTE: There’s been a lot of changes to the app which, as of November 2022, is on version 2.1. I haven’t spent much time with it yet so probably all of these notes are out-of-date now.
These options or features are now available:
Currently you see a small constrained view far down the end of a tube. You should really try to shoot for a big gorgeous panoramic view, a “spacewalk vista”, like what you get with TeleVue’s fantastic, wide apparent field eyepieces. Could you simply make use of the same kind of optics and/or display technology inside the electronic viewfinders that Sony and other camera manufacturers use in their digital SLR cameras? These digital display viewfinders do a fantastic job of enlarging the apparent view on these tiny little displays. They’re a joy to use and provide a much larger, clearer, detailed view than you get from the displays mounted on the backs of these same cameras. I realize this would require a hardware change but oh, what a view that would be! Along these same lines, could there be a way to make use of the full uncropped image in the eyepiece? With relatively large targets, the uncropped view on the phone’s display is much more expansive and enjoyable than the much constrained circular cropped view. Could there be a way to present the full uncropped rectangular view and allow it to be rotated in the eyepiece to deal with changes in the telescope’s orientation?
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| PLEASE NOTE: There’s been a lot of changes to the app which, as of November 2022, is on version 2.1. I haven’t spent much time with it yet so probably all of these notes are out-of-date now.
As of May 2021, these are the issues I currently see on version 1.3 of the Unistellar app for iOS 14 (iPhone 12 Pro and an iPad Pro):
The following issues all seem to be addressed – or at least haven’t happened again yet as of the given version. As of version 1.3:
As of version 1.1:
As of version 1.0:
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I recently received my eVscope from Unistellar and after just a few sessions with it, I thought I would share my thoughts and experiences with it so far – particularly since there wasn’t a lot of info available when I ordered it in back in July of 2019.
The Unistellar eVscope is quite different from a traditional optical telescope. It’s a highly integrated and automated digital imaging telescope that enables you to easily find and view deep sky objects in color and detail that would not normally be perceptible to your eye looking through a normal optical telescope. In addition, the eVscope is designed to let you easily participate in and contribute data to crowd-sourced “citizen science” projects.
The eVscope is a 4.5-inch Newtonian reflector that captures light on a highly sensitive, low noise Sony IMX224 color sensor while using a motorized alt-az tracking mount and autonomous field detection to automatically identify, align and continually track its view of the sky. Integrated image-processing software takes and combines an on-going series of short exposures to generate an image in almost real time that brings out much of the very low light, color and detail that’s not visible to the human eye even when looking through a normal telescope. This view accumulates over just seconds and minutes and is displayed both in the telescope’s eyepiece (on an OLED display) as well as on a WiFi-connected smartphone. The whole thing is self-powered via an integrated 9-10 hour rechargeable battery, fits into a large backpack and weighs just under 20 lbs. including the provided tripod.
In other words, it’s quite an impressive level of integration!
Darlene and I headed into Desolation Wilderness from the Meeks Bay trailhead on Lake Tahoe this Monday for three days, two nights of backpacking. This turned out to be a pretty easy going climb and less than five miles to the first lake (Genevieve) and a few more miles to where we camped at Stony Ridge Lake for both nights.
On our layover day, we continued on up to Rubicon Lake and then set off cross-country to reach the saddle to the southeast in hopes of a nice view overlooking Emerald Bay. Unfortunately, thunderclouds started coming in and we had to bail out before we could get to the overlook. On our way back down, we were caught in a surprisingly heavy hail storm and then had to dash down off the heights in the rain as the thunder and lightning approached. We returned to camp pretty soaked and moved everything a few hundred feet to a better location to wait out the storm. Happily the rain let up before the sun set for the day.
Fantastic night skies too, with no moon!
Click through for the full gallery:
Darlene and I went down to Pinnacles National Park for dark skies to watch the Geminids meteor shower Wednesday night:
Time-lapse of Geminids meteor shower
That’s a 20-second time-lapse I made looking south towards Orion about midnight, covering about 90 minutes that didn’t include any light trails from passing airplanes. And here’s a still shot.
Darlene and I managed to meet up with Glenn, Michele and Seaerra in Eastern Oregon this past week to experience the total solar eclipse together. We snagged a nice dispersed camping spot in the Malheur National Forest in an area I had scouted out back in June and we arrived four days early to get ahead of any potential crowds. As it turns out, we were in a remote enough area to only see a scattering of other campers.
We were also very lucky with the weather as there were a number of distant wildfires filling the skies with smoke days before and then it turned cloudy Sunday afternoon. But on Monday, the day of the eclipse, we had clear blue skies! (And smoke-filled skies the very next morning.)
A short video montage of the eclipse viewing experience (2.5 minutes)
And yes, seeing a total solar eclipse is truly an amazing experience. There’s the hour or so of build up beforehand as the light turns queer and dim and the heat of the sun fades away but then, as the last thin crescent splinter of sunlight disappears, you pull off your eye protection and… boom! The sun’s gorgeous corona suddenly appears streaming all around the pure black disc of the moon. It’s an incredible sight to behold. The sky was dark enough to reveal a couple of planets and a few brighter stars. The sky doesn’t go completely dark because of both the sun’s wispy corona and scattered sunlight from 35 miles away or less in every direction, outside the shadow of the moon.
The view was entirely captivating but, before we knew it, our two minutes of totality was already ending: a small bright bead of light starts to form which quickly brightens to create the stunning “diamond ring” effect. And then back on with the solar filters and glasses.
I had several cameras set up and recording different perspectives: one with a telephoto lens, one on a drone hovering out-of-earshot, one focused on the scene of us and one on my telescope to capture a much closer view (an 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain with a focal reducer to widen the view) and I’m so glad I did as we were able to see several solar eruptions in progress around the edge. Gorgeous!
Darlene and Michele also took some nice pics and video with handheld cameras. Click through for the full gallery of pictures and videos:
Here’s Michele (my sister-in-law)’s take on the experience: Midnight Sun
Update: Somebody asked me about our white sheet spread out on the ground and whether we had managed to see the elusive “shadow bands”. The answer is no, but this question prompted me to go back to the video that was rolling the whole time to see if I could find them.
They’re supposed to be very faint, thin, moving shadows (aka, “shadow snakes”) that are difficult to see and more difficult to record. We had looked specifically for them on the sheet about a minute before totality and then of course we were completely distracted by the amazing show in the sky afterward.
However, examining the video recording more closely and turning up the contrast, I think I may have found them:
Shadow bands?
Darlene and I made an overnight visit to Pinnacles National Monument last Thursday to catch the Perseids in a clear dark sky again. While enjoying the show, I took a few long exposures and caught a couple of meteors:
Caught a super thin crescent of a new moon chasing the sunset a couple of days ago:
Looked like it was on fire as it set behind the ridge – here’s some video through my telescope
(at 4x normal speed):
I’ve looked into telescopes a bit now and again, spurred by some new cool astronomical event but never actually took the plunge until just recently, near the end of 2013, with the approach and subsequent demise of comet ISON. This time I was committed to doing the research and actually ordering some gear… and, given my love of photography, astrophotographic gear too! Oh my, what a deep hole I’ve found here… what have I got myself into?!?
Things started out a little rough as my mount arrived in November with a manufacturing defect that I didn’t know enough to figure out immediately and required some back and forth with Celestron’s tech support to narrow down. Then I had to package it all back up and send it back and wait for a replacement.
But here it is, it’s an 8″ Celestron EdgeHD 800 on an Advanced VX mount – lovely! (It’s a Schimdt-Cassegrain on a German equatorial mount.)
My Celestron EdgeHD 800 telescope set up on my upstairs deck
I’ve long wanted to get a telescope, as in a real telescope, not that silly cheap thing I got as a kid in the 70’s. I’ve tinkered on and off with desktop and mobile apps for exploring the night sky, explored a bit with a nice pair of image-stabilized binoculars and attended the occasional star party here and there. (The one held on the slopes of Mauna Kea was pretty cool!)
And I wanted to take advantage of the somewhat darker skies I now have here in the hills above Santa Cruz – at least darker compared to my old condo in San Jose – that swath of light from Silicon Valley and the Bay Area is at least somewhat shielded by the coastal mountains here. I’ve got a nice, super-convenient, south-facing deck off of my upstairs master bedroom with an open view of most of the sky (except to the north, beneath the celestial pole). And once I get a little more experienced, it’ll be fun to pack up the gear and take it to some remote dark locations.
It’s pretty overwhelming how much there is to learn, particularly when you get into astronomical imaging, but I am certainly enjoying the endeavor. As such, I’ve decided to put together a little newbie’s guide to backyard astronomy to summarize all the information I’ve been gathering and the choices I’ve been making as to gear and setup: A Newbie’s Guide to Telescopic Adventures
So here’s a bit of first light through it – imaging a portion of the Orion nebula. Mind you, I’m just starting to get into this and this is just a newbie’s single, 16-second exposure to catch a bit of color:
Orion Nebula (M42), Nikon D7000, 16 seconds @ ISO 6400, 8″ EdgeHD, .7x reducer lens
(First published January 2014)
Thank goodness for the wealth of easy information sharing on the web. Would’ve been quite different diving in back in the early 90’s. Of course the gear has advanced a lot too. So here I am sharing the experience of jumping in relatively new. And how foolish for a newbie to write a guide for other newbies? Well, you’ve been warned – though I’ve long had an interest in astronomy, I’m really only just now getting into this very deep!
Darlene and I camped out on the east side of Pinnacles National Park this past Sunday to watch the Perseids meteor shower. We had some fairly dark skies as Pinnacles is in a somewhat remote location. The glow of lights from Hollister and Salinas (about 25-ish miles away) were apparent to the north but the Milky Way was still quite visible. And the crescent moon set nice and early. We spotted probably several meteors per minute. There were a few clusters of four or five.
I made a little video of some time lapse images I captured during the night:
As it was a Sunday night, getting a campsite was easy – most of the sites were vacant — not so on a Friday or Saturday night! There was lots of wildlife though… of the more natural variety. We had multiple visits from human-habituated deer, rabbits and a coyote in our campsite. (I don’t count the yellow jackets!) We went for a hike to see the nearby talus caves and saw a couple of bats but part of the caves were still closed to protect the bat colony. (Talus caves are formed by rocks and boulders falling into a narrow area to form a ceiling and block out the sky.) On Monday, we hiked the High Peaks loop and happened to run into an old coworker from FileMaker. We also saw some turkey vultures and possibly some California condors.
A nice conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter tonight — meaning that they appear very close together in the sky. With binoculars, you can see our moon, Jupiter nearby (appearing as a small disc) and several of Jupiter’s moons (several points of light around Jupiter) all at once. Pretty cool.
I tried to capture what I could see through my binoculars using my 400mm lens plus a 2x teleconverter on my DSLR but I wasn’t able to get a sharp image with my lightweight tripod, even with a delayed shutter release. (I have been meaning to get a heavy tripod for this sort of thing.) So this was the best I could do before the sky started to get a little cloudy with moisture — and I never got so far as finding an exposure to catch Jupiter’s moons as well:
I found the alien spacecraft hiding in front of the sun today!! It’s still there now as of 5 pm June 5th, slowly moving across the face. Alert the media!
Strangely, neither Pan or Hera seemed particularly concerned about this news, but at least Hera seemed to be paying attention.
(Okay, yes, for the benefit of finding this later, it’s a transit of Venus.)
I drove up to a spot near Lake Tahoe for the annular eclipse on the evening of May 20th, 2012. Unfortunately, I didn’t plan ahead and get the necessary solar filters to do any photography work — and checking around the couple of days before the event proved fruitless. But at least I had binoculars so I could set up a projection to watch it.
My little arrangement makes me think of the robot from the movie Short Circuit. Hmm, I suppose Wall-E too.
