Night sky at your fingertips like Unistellar, the Nikon team for the digital telescope – Pickr

Seeing what’s going on beyond our own world can be tricky with a proper telescope, but a new style is on the way as Nikon’s glass goes to an electronic eye.

Staring at the stars is a favorite pastime for many of us, sitting under a blanket of darkness studded with pins and dotted with dots of light that make us wonder what else is there. It’s a hobby that could lead you down a complicated road of telescopes and tripods, spotting scopes and star tracking, and can end up being too dizzying.

There are many different options for people wanting to get started in astronomy, from very cheap to very expensive, but the community is also trying to bring the material to people wanting to adopt a more digital style of astronomy.

While you can still capture a decent photo of the moon with a familiar camera and a little patience and skill, if you want to venture beyond that stunning nightlight in the sky, you can start watching new ones as well. breeds of telescopes. .

Earlier in the year the Vaonis Vespera showed what could happen when a telescope could be made easier, connecting to an app to control everything, and this week we’re hearing about another, and it will have the optics of a major brand of camera and glass.

Unistellar has announced the launch of the eVscope 2, a digital telescope connected to an app and digital to the core, based on a Sony 7.7 megapixel sensor with a 50x lens capable of seeing 450mm, while the digital zoom (also known as “cropping”) can capture up to a recommended maximum of 150x, but also push it to 400x if you don’t mind seeing the odd pixel.

A collaboration with Nikon allowed Unistellar to introduce Nikon’s glass in eyepieces, made up of elements from the camera giant’s optical labs to deliver something different and potentially better for the eye on a screen. micro OLED.

This comes with something Unistellar calls “Enhanced Vision” which balances the contrast of what you see in the sky and combines the accumulated light from distant stars, potentially improving views over a standard telescope finder. You don’t look through a conventional telescope in the eVscope 2, which instead acts like a mirrorless camera and visualizes the result through what a sensor sees.

Because of this all-digital approach, there is also an app, which can help you automatically point a telescope at events in the sky, and even live stream what you are doing and watching. It’s all motorized on a set of portable tripod legs, comes with around 10 hours of battery life, and the app can help you find what you’re looking for without needing to manually adjust the telescope with a spotting scope and coordinates.

There’s even a little software in-game to help people who live in cities, with light pollution reduction technology to reduce background light to capture astrophotography images of a city interior.

“Amateur astronomy typically requires a location in the dark sky, complex gear assembly, tedious setup, often hours of image processing – plus the knowledge to put it all together,” said Laurent Marfisi, CEO by Unistellar.

“With the eVscope 2, anyone can participate in a quick half-hour observation session and enjoy many colorful deep space objects, even from a downtown balcony,” a- he declared. “Our technology is helping astronomy finally play a role in people’s daily lives.”

The plug for the Unistellar eVscope 2 can boil down to price, all of which is priced at $ 4,199, which in turn translates to just under $ 6,000 in Australia. Granted, this is not a cheap kit, and a dollar figure that can get you a little inland telescope from retailers that sell telescopes locally.

Unistellar already has locals using its equipment in Australia, which you can find on its Citizen Astronomers Map, but the company told Pickr there may not be local availability of the eVscope 2. beyond ordering online and taking into account conversion and shipping costs.

If that doesn’t bother you and you’re looking for a hobbyist-friendly approach to astrophotography, the Unistellar eVscope 2 might be worth checking out when it starts shipping in November.