Telescope design promises to revolutionize amateur astronomy July 20, 2017

The SETI Institute and French startup Unistellar announced a partnership
today to commercialize a new telescope that promises to deliver an
unparalleled view of the cosmos to amateur astronomers, and provide the opportunity to contribute directly to cutting-edge science.

Unistellar's new eVscope leverages "Enhanced Vision" imaging technology and
now provides three unique features never before offered in a compact mass-market instrument thanks to this partnership:

Enhanced Vision produces extremely sharp, detailed images of even faint astronomical objects by accumulating their light and projecting it into the telescope's eyepiece. Enhanced Vision technology mimics the light gathering capability of significantly larger reflector telescopes, thus delivering unprecedented views of night-sky objects previously inaccessible to amateur astronomers.
Autonomous Field Detection (AFD) powered by GPS, enables the eVscope to pinpoint celestial objects of interest without complicated alignment
procedures or expensive equatorial mounts. Thanks to AFD intelligent pointing and tracking, astronomers from novice to expert, can spend more time
observing and always know precisely what they are looking at. This system is also able to name any object the user is observing, thanks to a coordinates database of tens of millions of celestial objects.
Campaign Mode, a revolutionary and exciting feature developed at the SETI Institute, takes advantage of the telescope's advanced imaging technology and 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.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-telescope-revolutionize-amateur-astronomy.html

A prototype of the Unistellar telescope has been delivered to the SETI Institute for testing and development of the Campaign Mode data network. Amateur astronomers will have a chance to help fund further development of
the device by purchasing it for less than $1000 in a crowdfunding campaign
set to launch in the Fall of 2017.

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