Modern Telescopes Are Really Good!

To anyone over 30 trying to teach a budding stargazer the basics of the night sky, it must come as a rude shock today how today's telescopes, have automated tools. The way it's been done so far, you had to really know your star charts, and you really needed to know how to plot and read charts and things.

These days, it's pretty much point-and-shoot – with smart high-tech telescopes and even iPhone apps. These days, choosing a telescope, you just need to go for one of the smart models. You take it out of the box, set it down in your backyard, and the telescope finds its bearings right away. It knows exactly where it is on Earth and which way it's facing. Any which way you move it, it knows where exactly it's being moved and it'll tell you where the star Vega is, where the galaxy Andromeda is and so on.

Choosing a telescope these days, you need to look not just for the size of the lens and so on, but also how much assistance it can give you. Models in the SkyProdigy range by Celestron that cost about $600 can help bring more and more amateurs into the field. You might think that seasoned astronomers who really took the stairs learning about the skies would disapprove of such automation; but they don't.

They actually think it's a great idea. Because without these aids, most people wouldn't be able to find anything in the sky. And that's a great loss for astronomy – to be reduced to being a difficult hobby for fringe fanatics. So how exactly does such a telescope go about finding its bearings? They have digital cameras inside that snap pictures of the skies above. They have internal processors and databases that they compare the pictures to, to find a match. Of course, automation and telescopes that help amateurs find things isn't new.

We've for long had telescopes with motors and processors and databases. But up until now, these weren't entirely automatic. They needed to be set up a bit before they could do anything. You still need to know how to align them.

 There's a great deal that smartphones can do in all of this too. They have powerful processors and memory and they are Internet-connected. Basically, they can do things that not even the smartest amateur telescopes can do. The $12 Redshift app for Apple's mobile devices can identify all the bright objects in the sky. All you have to do is hold the device up facing the sky. There are lots of other apps that amateur astronomers use, too – Google Sky Map and Star Walk being just two of them.

You'd think that these were niche products for astronomy geeks; but they aren't. They just open the wonderful world of astronomy to mainstream audiences who then want to go and buy telescopes to be able to see everything with their own eyes. And if you have a telescope and a smartphone, you can buy an adapter to put the phone to the eyepiece and take pictures. It'll be your own picture of Jupiter on your own phone. And that's quite a kick.

Choosing a telescope just became easier. If you're looking to enjoy the wonders of the night sky, there is no better time than now to get a telescope.

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