I think AAVSO should reach out to these people....
http://unistellaroptics.com/en/product
WITH A REGULAR TELESCOPE YOU'LL SEE THE MOON AND PLANETS… WITH THE UNISTELLAR ENHANCED VISION TELESCOPE™ YOU'LL OPEN A WINDOW TO THE REST OF THE UNIVERSE.
LIGHT AMPLIFICATION
Turn Light Amplification on and the system will use its low-light sensor to accumulate light through a series of short exposures. The resulting image is projected into the eyepiece as the accumulation occurs, which means that once you start Light Amplification, you’ll see something, but the object will keep improving with time.
Depending on observing conditions (light pollution, moon phase, weather, etc…) and the objects you are pointing at, it can take from a few seconds to several tens of seconds for you to start seeing the beautiful colors and shapes of galaxies and nebulae normally invisible directly through the eyepiece of a regular or even a high-end telescope.
FIELD RECOGNITION
Our system instantly recognizes objects in your field of view by comparing them to exhaustive databases of tens of millions of stars. It can then display names and information about what you’re observing (size, distance to Earth, etc.). Field Recognition also means that our automated tracking and pointing systems are super accurate.
CITIZEN SCIENCE
We’re working with a former member of the United Nations workgroup on planetary defense and near-Earth objects on a feature that will allow users to participate in important science: connect yourself to an asteroid watch network and you can gather data to help index and characterize asteroids, including those potentially harmful to the Earth. We are also exploring other exciting applications in partnership with the SETI Institute.
LIGHT WEIGHT
Light amplification means that a small telescope can also be powerful. Our telescope is so small that you can carry it in a backpack!
Very interesting gadget! I'll be looking for more news on this one, like price and availability. Depending on the final specs, there would be some possibility that this 'scope could be used for variable stars.
Arne
This reminds me a little of the old Collins I3 intensifier eyepieces. It seems like it works somewhat differently, rather than "real-time" amplification, it does it by light integration. Nevertheless, the same issues apply. One of the principal concerns is the spectral response, how it compares to true direct visual, or standard photometric filters?
Another issue, these typically have narrow afov, fixed power eyepieces, which may cause practical difficulties in using the comp stars.
And, what about resolution? If it does lengthy integrations, how well does it track and superimpose the images? To a few arcseconds, or not?
So, this would need to be critically evaluated against the standard visual telescopes to make a determination of its suitability.
Mike
Interesting. The aperture of this thingy is like what, 75mm?? It doesn't seem to be Newtonian, I'm not sure what the telescope design actually is and found no info on it after a qucik look at the website, but I guess a focal length of 400mm to 750 mm is a safe guess. So if this thing has the ability to extract raw images of the stacked images from the sensor, it might be able to do photometry comparable to DSLRs, in theory.
I would think that one potential problem tho could be that for this product, they definitly do not want to put an IR blocking filter in front of the sensor. They will want to be sensitive at the Halpha wavelength, which would require either no IR filter or one that kicks in at longer wavelength than the usual filters they put on consumer color sensors (for "human eye immitating" daylight photography), That could mean all sorts of leakages of IR (and UV if there is no filter for that either) into the bands relevant for photometry. To keep costs down, I'm quite sure they will want to go for a mass-produced, relatively large, Bayer-matrix consumer CMOS sensor.
Still, everything that gets people interested in the stars (and then also variable stars) is welcome! This observing technique of live stacking could become very popular and might lead to this becoming available as an accessory for regular telescopes, and could perhaps lead to renewed interest in amateur astronomy as it addresses the "instant gratification" need of our times.
CS
HBE
I fully concur with Mike's assessment of Unistar's potential application as applied to variable star observing. These gimmicky, rich man's toys, are fine to the casual stargazer, but with their questionable spectral response relative to the human eye, or CCD detectors, I would never want to see the magnitude estimates the observer might derive from their usage folded into our lightcurves.
Rather than attempting to integrate another system into our lightcurves, which to my mind already often show too much incongruity between the melded data from visual, CCD, and DSLR combined results, it is more important to get agreement among the systems that we are presently committed to, rather than expanding into new and untested areas.
J.Bortle (BRJ)