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Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

> Enhanced Vision produces extremely sharp, detailed images of even faint astronomical objects by accumulating their light and projecting it into the telescope's eyepiece. Enhanced Vision technology mimics the light gathering capability of significantly larger reflector telescopes

> Our compact 4.5-inch telescope allows observers to see objects fainter than Pluto and achieve sensitivity equivalent to a one-meter telescope!

These claims are impossible for a direct-view optical telescope. But do they imply that they are accumulating photons on an image sensor and showing the image to the observer electronically - basically long exposure photography?

On a side note, the web page hijacks clipboard copying and inserts a source URL.

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Yes, looks like it's long exposure photography but with the resulting photos displayed in real time:

"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."

Pretty neat idea.

That doesn't seem particularly revolutionary to me though. You can already do this with existing software used for image-stacking, though not directly through a viewfinder (though the "viewfinder" on a real telescope designed for astrophotography should be a computer display anyway).

That's a very good point.

I think what's revolutionary about it is the speed and simplicity. Sure, you can do this already with image stacking software, if you already know what you're doing or want to spend 600+ minutes learning how to do it. But this promises to just point and shoot and see almost equivalent results in near real time, a speedup of ~100x. So a two order magnitude speed improvement for the novice is a big deal, imo.

Yes, that does seem nifty. And it'll be good for pure stargazing scenarios, in which you're not attempting to record an image. For astrophotgraphy, however, it'll be a wash, as all you need a viewfinder for in those situations is to ensure that you're pointed at the desired object; the final output is always going to be best viewed on a proper display.

I suppose what this is really doing is bringing the benefits of some common astrophotography techniques into casual stargazing, which is cool. Too bad the press release doesn't explain it properly.

> Too bad the press release doesn't explain it properly.

Agreed.

Wasn't until I read the actual site (http://www.unistellaroptics.com/en/product) that I got excited.

Yeah, that's way better, and is actually something that might excite people who are into astronomy. The original article was written by someone who simply didn't know what they were talking about at all, and used copious marketing speak to try to make up for it.

Well, I'm guessing it will have something similar to the digital viewfinder you see in modern cameras.

If you use that together with a medium range camera and some basic computing (or dedicated chip) to stack and remove noise from images, what they are claiming seems doable, as long as you are under good astronomical observation conditions.

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