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Astronomy for all: that was the mission with which the French company Unistellar was founded five years ago. A new type of telescope should make the sky accessible everywhere. 2,000 supporters financed the product in France’s largest crowdfunding campaign to date with € 2.2 million. Unistellar now reports having created the first image of a “crowdsourced” comet from the data of several dozen widely distributed telescopes.
“Super photo” of 40 observation sites
Anyone looking at the starry sky for the first time through a powerful telescope can easily be disappointed. Despite the large diameter of the mirror, none of the magnificent colors can be seen, which are known from countless images on television, the Internet, calendars, or books. This is because the human eye cannot accumulate incident photons, while electronic sensors, as well as chemical film, absorb more information about the spectral composition of light the longer they are exposed. The eVscope should transmit this effect in near real time, gradually enriching the optical image of the 11-centimeter mirror with the digital information collected by a sensor.
Data from a total of 40 observation sites are combined and processed into a “super image”.
(Image: Unistellar)
Even more information can be gathered by gathering data from multiple telescopes. This has happened now: On April 11, reports from Unistellar, eVscope users in Belgium, France, Finland, Germany, Britain, Switzerland, and other countries agreed to visit Comet C / 2019 Y4 (ATLAS), which is apparently in decomposition. viewing at the same time Data from a total of 40 observation sites were merged into the Unistellar server and processed into a “super image”. “Our analysis shows that we see the weakest objects, such as very pale stars at the bottom of the comet (up to size 18),” says Arnaud Malvache, CTO of Unistellars. According to the company’s advertising, the single telescope should only be capable of making stars up to size 16 visible.
More of such collective surveillance campaigns should follow. Unistellar works together with the SETI Institute. Frank Marchis, who works there as an astronomer and is scientific director of Unistellar, can imagine focusing on new supernovae or tracking asteroids that fly close to Earth. In this way, users of the eVscope should not only experience the universe again, but also contribute to scientific discoveries as citizen scientists.
The Unistellar eVscope
(bme)
