Introducing our new Unistellar eVscope

We’ve absolutely loved using our 8” Dobsonian telescope on our Starry Night Adventures. It’s simple to use and offers incredible optical views. There’s one downside though, it’s size, it’s pretty big, and whilst it has an incredible wow factor, there’s more to it. The size and weight of this beautiful telescope has placed a few restrictions on where we can take it, its inventor John Dobson nicknamed it the ‘sidewalk telescope’ - his main wish after studying the the night sky from his monastery in San Francisco was to make a telescope to take astronomy to the people, first on the sidewalks of San Fran then in mirror making classes. For us we love it when on flat ground but for the mountains of Queenstown especially in snow we needed something a little more dynamic. Enter our friends at ASTRONZ who have provided us with their enthusiasm and encouragement to bring fourth a Unisteller EVscope.

We want our manuhiri (guests) to feel like it’s just us facing the universe together in our small, private group. We’ve learnt that being able to set up our equipment quickly is paramount. The SMART technology mitigates light pollution for deep space and allows crisp detail on those full moon nights. Deep space objects are mind blowing to witness first hand, and the human eye is incredible, but there’s only so much light it can process in real time. We want to see deeper into space, further back in time and bring those colours out!

The photographs we take of you with our camera equipment are absolutely loved and create incredible treasured memories for many years to come. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able add images of the stellar objects we’ve seen into your AuthenticAs Starry Nights photo album

Needless to say, we love it, and so do our manuhiri, as on completion of your tour we include the images from the EVscope labelled with the night sky feature we were observing along with your night scape and astro portraits.

But what exactly is it? We hear you ask. Essentially, it’s a pretty fancy camera. Rather than put your eye up to an eyepiece and experience the photons from those distant stars hit your retina’s in real time, there is a sensor that collects them up for us. It’s dedicated chipset then stacks the electronic signals the sensor generates on top of each other in real time, building up an image right in front of our eyes on our iPad. The telescope is on a motorised mount that tracks and follows what we’re looking at as Earth spins about it’s access and we hurtle through space around our closest star, Tamanuiterā - The Sun.

As many of us are familiar with, when we want to view the Aurora, we can see it with our naked eye and more often than not it’s very faint and greyscale. When we use a camera to collect the photons emitted from the molecules in our atmosphere as they absorb cosmic rays emitted from Tamanuiterā, the camera amplifies the colours and detail in an absolutely mind blowing way. This new telescope does essentially that, rather than have a really wide lens, this is a pretty long telephoto one, 450mm to be exact..

There’s a purist view that it’s not the same, and we were worried about that. What we’ve found in the last month or so we’ve been using it on tours, is that in practice, it’s really not an issue. The AuthenticAs Starry Night adventures lead you through the night sky in a few different ways. We start off with our eyes, then we move to binoculars, and then we travel further back in time using a telescope. The first two of those steps involve our eyes collecting up those ancient photons.

Simon was once asked what happens when two galaxies collide? We can talk our way through the answer, but as the old saying goes, a picture tells a thousand words. So we can point our telescope towards the Antenae Galaxies, then within seconds two spiral galaxies merging together appear right before our eyes. The light from them has been on a journey of 65 million years in order to help us tell this story. Watching them appear stops everyone in their tracks, it’s truly mind blowing. They are next to impossible to see with your naked eye, even on a cold crisp new moon night. Binoculars offer a different story, and the Dobsonian will take a while to find them. Now we’re there in a matter of seconds.

Rather than being a complete handful, Roboscope, as Simon calls it, fits neatly into a backpack and can be transported almost anywhere, giving us the option to explore even more places with you. There’s no need get to a spot and stay there, we can take you on a Starry Night walk, along the way we’ll introduce you to the universe and explain the basic concepts, as well as tell kōrerō (stories) about the place we’re in and the beautiful flora and fauna that surround us. This also helps keep us warmer for longer, another major positive.

Setting up Roboscope is fast, and each time we use it, it gets faster again. We can target thousands of targets quickly and it saves pictures of everything we’ve looked at, which we’ll put into your AuthenticAs Starry Night Adventure Photo Album.

AND we also want to mention that when we image using the Unistellar eVscope on a night with a very bright moon, even with some passing clouds we get incredible images. This is so much better than we see with the 8” Dobsonian and has absolutely transformed our AuthenticAs Starry Night Adventures during those brighter nights of the lunar month.

Here’s just a few examples of some of the objects we’ll be looking at this winter

The Tarantula Nebula

Around 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud we find the Tarantula Nebula. This is the largest and brightest star-forming region in the Local Group (the galaxies nearest our Milky Way). It is home to the hottest, most massive stars known. On a dark night we can see the LMC with our naked eyes, it looks like a faint rugby ball shaped cloud to the South and easily make out the Tarantula Nebula through our 10x50 binoculars guided by our laser pointer.

Omega Centauri

This globular cluster is the largest globular cluster in the Milky Way, our home galaxy and contains approximately 10 millions stars, within its 150 light year diameter. It is about 16,000 light-years away from us, and orbits the centre of our galaxy outside of the galactic disk. It is visible to the naked eye and looks like a fuzzy blob instead of a point when viewed through the binoculars.

The Antennae Galaxies

The Antennae Galaxies are a pair of colliding galaxies located in the constellation Corvus. At a distance of potentially 65 million light years away from us, we’re looking at light that was emitted at the time the dinosaurs roamed the earth. What we see here is a perfect example of two spiral galaxies merging, a fate our own galaxy will undergo in several billion years time when we collide with the Andromeda Galaxy