Cosmic Show Time! — How to Thrill Family and Friends with Your Smart Telescope

The opening image here shows a hero of mine, George van Biesbroeck, at the observing end of the Yerkes 40 inch refractor sometime in the 1920s. I think most average people think astronomers look through telescopes like this. In actuality he’s probably showing how he measured the separation of double stars with something called a filar micrometer. This was important for determining stellar masses at one time, but in terms of great cosmic views there was little “Wow!” (There are currently attempts at resurrecting this instrument, but I wouldn’t hold your breath that it will come back to life in a way that will be as good as most amateur scopes. And, in any case, with a focal length of 62 feet, views through it will only be interesting with small angular sized objects — measured in arc seconds.)

Surprisingly, our tiny smart telescopes can deliver much more interesting views of the cosmos. I know that many of our fellow users are keenly interested in pushing the astrophotography capabilities and doing great post processing, but I am much more interested in sharing what I’m interested in and giving them a mind expanding experience. At least that’s what much of my professional life was focused on. With these little telescopes we can indeed present the deep universe in near real time and make it meaningful. This blog posting is a reflection on what I’ve learned when using primarily my eVscope with friends and the public. I am just now learning to use my Vespera for such events and I’m convinced that the other new ones coming on line can work in the same way. I really recommend that you try because you will be gratified and surprised at how others will cherish and even share their experience.

Here are a few categories of issues to worry about or think about. They’re based on my experiences. If you have other thoughts or things to add, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Preconceptions

The key to using one of these things with novices is to not bore or confuse them. Making them yawn with tech talk or too much astronomy (my special weakness) is important. I find I need to be on the alert for any odd pre-conceptions they might have. Always pause and leverage off of pre-concepts with anything else you’re going to explain. For example, I had a friend who thought our Solar System’s planets literally moved among the stars. He is a brilliant friend in his day job, but here I had to explain basic Solar System astronomy and how the night sky stars are 10,000 to 10,000,000 times farther than Neptune.

I’ve also heard of Federal legislators, upon visiting NASA Goddard say they thought the Sun is really much smaller than the Earth. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at their science literacy these days, but this realization was shocking to me too.

Science educators all know about the pre-concept challenge. If pre-conceptions aren’t deconstructed, then it’s hard to build new, more appropriate concepts. The problem for us is that we are generally likely to show off images of deep space — a realm most have only encountered in watching Star Trek or Star Wars.

Physical Set Up

The physical set up of your observing post is pretty easy with these smart scopes. I always connect my scope to an iPad and have it on a tripod or portable table. Yes, my eVscope allows eyepiece viewing, so I have that too, but most of the action takes place standing around the iPad. Tablets are excellent because they allow small group discussions. I’ve been surprised at how well talking about an object with a handful of star party visitors works. The entire experience transforms from a private eyepiece revelation to a small group discussion. It’s not that I don’t like eyepieces, I do, it’s that it’s much easier to help people understand what they’re seeing on an iPad or similar.

Except for my close friends, I generally don’t invite others to connect to my scopes. Sometimes they can wind up with control. That’s not so bad, but I’ve found that the process of downloading and starting the app up for them is awkward and not necessary.

Rehearsing the entire set up and speed at which you can observe is important. On a couple occasions I’ve embarrassed myself mightily by promising something I couldn’t deliver or getting fouled up starting out on the right foot. In worst cases, I’ve crashed my systems and had to bring them back home to re-boot totally. Luckily I was with close friends these times I really fumbled.

Share your Images with a Public Folder

If you’ve ever conducted regular star parties with normal telescopes you’ll know that people like to try and take pictures through eyepieces with their mobile phones. Well, I find that to be quite distracting and frankly not a great way to capture an image for a novice. Instead, I give them the following link to my public observing folder. I give it to them as a QR code. Here is the actual link.

After a star party or observing session I will only have in it the images we took then and there plus one or two images we might have discussed like the recent supernova. Feel free to check my folder from time to time.

(N.B.: At the time of this posting my public folder just contains some recent images I took with some neighbors in my back alley. The Canadian fires have made the transparency horrible these days. Note that I will update these images if you come back to them later.)

Generally, I don’t process the images much beyond cropping at times. I just upload them as quickly as I can so they have them to download. You’ll be surprised at how many people then love to then share them with others. In fact I can’t remember a session in the past couple years where someone doesn’t say, “Wait until I show this to so and so.”

You’ll also notice in this folder I have a couple images of good starter telescopes. I don’t send first-time astronomy enthusiasts necessarily to smart telescopes. I think good, affordable Newtonians are generally the way to begin.

Plan your “Tour” Carefully

Usually, I would skip the Moon and planets. The Moon can be okay, but the planets are generally ho hum in these smart telescopes. You’ll do much better with a regular SCT or Maksutov which have long focal lengths and there’s plenty of signal to noise without image stacking tricks.

Then, what I do is to go for the best targets in the sky in terms of compositional detail. By that I mean they are just intriguing to look at or there’s a lot of information just in the image itself. For me, looking at a point of light from Pluto might be exciting, but I will never start off with something like that or a quasar, for example.

My typical tour consists of 3 - 4 objects. I start with the most riveting and then try to make the succeeding objects support it. For example, start with the most spectacular globular cluster and then throw in one or two others to build on the knowledge from the first one.

It’s nice to give your audience a chance to choose from a handful of objects after the first two. One of the fabulous features of these scopes is that on any given night we literally have a dozen good targets. It’s fun to give the viewers a choice too.

Tempo is Important

We need to be mindful of how long to spend on each object before going on. I will usually choose objects that will look pretty good by 15 minutes at the most. That way if there’s a lull in the program I can continue on. And, with larger star parties I might need all that time and a bit more for people to all see the object and ask questions.

Luckily jumping to succeeding objects only takes about a minute or two. There’s no need to fumble about trying to find objects in the sky. And, because it’s fun to watch the image stacking take place I’ve found that it’s hard to bore people unless I stay too long on one object.

And, finally, it’s just fine to wrap up before too long and leave them wanting more. I always tell my neighbors that the offerings will change with the seasons so we can have something new to see in just a couple months.

You’ll all Benefit from a Story Line

Because I’ve spent most of my career working in planetariums, teaching astronomy and planning large astronomy exhibitions, I can’t underemphasized how important a basic story line or big idea can be.

A story line might be about star formation and death in the Milky Way. This one works well in the Summer or Winter time. I sometimes tell my guests that the Galaxy is like a family album for stars and their kind.

Another story line I used in these blogs and recent audiences is to talk about globular clusters and how they help us suss out where we are in the galaxy. Spring and Fall are good times to describe the intergalactic universe.

One captivating idea is important to be able to articulate, if you can. For example, I used the fact that globular clusters are the oldest thing anyone will see on my neighbors. They liked that thought and it led to some interesting discussion.

What ever we do, we need to be slow to spew out too many facts. Make sure you have them straight for the objects on your play list, but don’t really talk about them until the appropriate moment.

I should also add that you will need to explain succinctly how your smart telescope does what it does. No one has really seen this type of scope before. How it works and can see deep space when they can only see a few stars is important to explain if it seems appropriate.

Be Prepared to Lead a Discussion

In other words, make sure you know what you’re talking about. I can’t emphasize this enough. When you were just showing the craters on the Moon or the rings of Saturn showing off your telescope was really easy. Now you’re on to “graduate school” in terms of what you need to know. Luckily for me, I did go to graduate school in astronomy and astrophysics. For me, however, I can often give too much information or veer off into quantum mechanics if I’m not careful.

Speaking of graduate school, the program curriculum I benefitted from at the University of Chicago was organized by Struve and Chandrasekhar. It was very complete and gave a rock solid grounding — especially in stellar astronomy. I won’t recommend any of Chandra’s books, because they can induce acute mental inferiority paralysis, but Struve wrote a terrific undergraduate text book way back in 1959 when he was at Berkeley. It is out of date in many places, but really only in detail. The basics of observational astronomy and especially pragmatic stellar astronomy he wrote about is still spot on. It’s called “Elementary Astronomy,” by Otto Struve, Beverly Lynds and Hellen Pillans, Oxford University Press. If you can find a used copy, it’s well worth having and won’t cost much.

More than anything we will see countless stars with our smart scopes. Galaxies and clusters are just made of stars. And the great nebulae are either stellar nurseries or graveyards. You can’t know enough about stars.

“You mean that’s there?”

My last subheading is a quote from a student of a colleague of mine who works at a west coast university. He took his students out into the university quadrangle to use his department’s eVscope. They had just been studying galaxies. While he was getting going he showed them where M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy would be near the Big Dipper. As the image started to improve with stacking, one of his hard to impress undergrads pointed to the sky and said, “You mean that’s there?” The answer was, of course yes and much more.

I hope this short blog entry convinces you to take your show on the road sometime, even if it’s just with you next door neighbor. Good luck, clear skies and I hope the forest fire smoke does not get in your smart telescope's eyes.... ;-)

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Image Credit:

George A. Van Biesbroeck (1880-1974), astronomer at Yerkes Observatory observing Mars when it approached close to the earth in 1926, and using the 40 inch refracting telescope, the largest of its kind in the world.

Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 90-105, Science Service Records, Image No. SIA2010-0289