How Telescopes Have Gotten Smarter: Like a Hubble in My Backyard!

It used to be an easy issue. Anyone could derive endless pleasure and mind-stretching knowledge through non-telescopic observations of the night sky provided they were away from city lights. 

The most spectacular celestial experiences require no magnification or optical help yet can produce near-mystical feelings of Nature’s grandeur. The Milky Way from an unpolluted site. Total solar eclipses. The unpredictable patterns of the aurora borealis. The lore, legend, and science of the 88 constellations. The ever-changing annual motions and varying brilliances of the planets. 

All yours without spending a penny.

Improvements in Telescopes

However, great innovation has occurred in the past few years. It’s hard to ignore these incredible advances in digital technology, which allow regular at-home astronomy and space fans to capture mind-boggling images from their backyard and even make citizen science discoveries. 

A half dozen companies started producing portable 20-pound instruments in soft-carrying cases. These at-home telescopes let anyone put a capable telescope into an aircraft’s overhead compartment and use it on vacation simply by hitting a few keys on their smartphone.

Truthfully, the revolution probably started much earlier, perhaps 25 years ago, when my old friend, the chronically cranky John Dobson, led the insurgency by designing a cheap mounting that let all of one’s sky-budget go into optical components. As a result, one could spend just a few hundred dollars and get a telescope that would beautifully show the rings of planet Saturn and so much more. Views guaranteed to take away one’s breath.

Is a telescope now a must-have in your love of the night sky and nature? Maybe. But maybe not. Let’s lay out the facts, and you can decide.

Naked-Eye Viewing

First, be aware that for countless centuries, nature lovers have started their life of sky-exploration WITHOUT a telescope. They simply learned about the stars. It wasn’t hard, and still is not today. 

By age 13, your author had memorized every single visible star! This sounds like a grander accomplishment than it was since only 76 have proper names still in use. 

Throw in another couple hundred that merely possess Greek letter designations, like Alpha Centauri. The constellations are even easier since these are patterns, and humans are good with visual formations. You can take the old-fashioned but effective route by sending away for Norton’s Star Atlas, which removes any confusing crowdedness by dividing the sky into more than a dozen charts. 

Binoculars

Then you may have discovered binoculars. Your ordinary eyes plus a pair of binoculars provide years of astronomical exploration and pleasure. 

When you decide to dive more deeply, you quickly find that the old pair of binoculars you haven’t used in years makes the little Seven Sisters star cluster glow with not the half dozen stars seen with your naked eye but with hundreds of blue diamonds that take the breath away. The same binoculars, swept slowly along the Milky Way when you visit your friends in the country, reveal fuzzy patches of giant gas clouds where new suns are being born. You see ten times as many stars as appeared to the unaided eye.

Before you know it, the sky has become a familiar place, and it stays that way for your entire life. So that’s the important first step, which, sadly, too many skip. 

Most star patterns have simple shapes, even if they don’t resemble the mythological figure for which they’re named. The “Great Bear,” Ursa Major, doesn’t form any kind of readily definable grizzly, but most of its sky-territory is the easily remembered Big Dipper. 

Then, if you’ve hung out with your local astronomy club during their monthly outdoor meetings, an excellent strategy for beginners, you found that many members were happy to show you how the Dipper’s two “pointer stars” aim toward Polaris, the North Star, and how its curved handle “arcs to Arcturus,” the brightest star of spring and summer.

The Telescope

Then, there’s the issue of money. No telescope under around $400 is worth purchasing. But once you spend that much, you can obtain what’s called a “Dobsonian telescope.” This usually consists of a sturdy white cardboard tube supported on a round, hockey-puck-like piece of wood that lets the tube swivel up and down and sideways. It’s a large version of a ‘lazy Susan’ salt and pepper dispenser on the kitchen table. 

For that price, it will probably house a reflector telescope with a four-inch-diameter mirror. Or a six-inch mirror if you did well with your purchasing skills. This is not chopped liver. The diameter of an instrument’s lens or mirror is what determines how much it can show you. So, a telescope’s fatness, not its length, instantly reveals its true power and abilities.

Your new instrument will reveal endless lunar detail, with shadowed craters changing their appearance nightly. And the rings of Saturn, the surface bands of Jupiter, and that giant planet’s four big satellites. On and on. There will be lots to see.

But like boat owners who famously tend to crave ever-larger vessels predictably, those with a serious, continuing love of the heavens may soon want a larger telescope that will reveal globular star clusters containing a million Suns and views of distant galaxies and such. 

For that, you’d want your telescope to have a mirror at least eight or ten inches wide, along with the kind of mounting that can track the object so that as Earth turns, your target won’t quickly vanish from view. And now you’re up to at least $1,200. Expect to pay that much for a telescope that can serve you well for your entire life. Budget definitely enters the picture.

Then there’s the issue of photography. Capturing colorful images of nebulae and galaxies and sharing them with others has become a major part of the astronomy hobby for many (but not all) observers. With simpler telescopes, taking long-exposure images requires a skill set, patience, and a long learning curve. 

And here’s where the brand new breed of automated telescopes enters the cosmic arena.

A New Breed of Automated Telescopes

Those simple 20-pound portable scopes we mentioned at the outset? The ones that require no sky knowledge or special setup but merely a level bit of ground? 

These have built-in computer algorithms that are now astounding. You set the instrument down, go to the app on your smartphone that you got when you bought the telescope, choose from a long list of objects, and click on whatever you’d like to see. 

The instrument starts moving as if by magic. 

• It examines the sky, figures out precisely where it’s located on our planet Earth, moves one way and then another, and in a few minutes, your desired target is right there on your phone’s screen. 
• As a few minutes pass, the image keeps improving, and the colors become more vivid. A special filter that you forked out a few hundred additional dollars to include screens out the light pollution from the amber skyglow over the big city you’re in. 
• You’re soon staring at the image of the desired object with all the color and detail you’ve seen in high-tech astronomy magazines or TV shows.

The Pros

The pros are obvious. It’s easier than burning the toast. The result is gorgeous. The image can be saved forever and shared. And you never had to learn a single thing about astronomy.

The Cons

The cons are there, too. These automated instruments are not cheap. The best ones are $2,000, and the cheapest are almost half that amount. 

Also, you are not actually looking directly at the object with your eyes in the sense that its light enters your eye and brain. Rather, you stare at a screen. Some argue that looking down at a screen is not really “observing a celestial object.” Does looking at a photo of a woodpecker count as an “observation” of that bird? I really don’t know the answer.

The main point is that telescopes have radically changed in the past few years, and the hobby and passion of exploring the universe are altering at a breathtaking pace. 

Refractor Telescopes Have Also Improved

Another major change is that refractor telescopes, the simplest kind like the one Galileo first used in 1609, have also greatly evolved in recent years. So-called “department store telescopes” on flimsy, shaky mounts have always been very bad astronomy purchases. 

They’re often called “hobby killers.” But starting around 30 years ago, several high-end manufacturers like Takahashi and Astrophysics put special extra lenses on these previously simple instruments. In some cases, they even used transparent minerals like fluorite instead of glass and successfully eliminated the false color fringes and other optical imperfections that have plagued refractors for four centuries. 

Called “Apochromatic refractors,” they bring a new level of image perfection within the range of backyard hobbyists—for a steep price. My 5” Takahashi refractor on an ultra-accurate mount by the same company sits on a pier in one of my two observatories. It’s awesome. But it cost over $20,000. This kind of quality and price was almost unheard—of until recently. As one who taught college astrophysics, I could rationalize the expense and even “write off” some of the cost. But it’s obviously not where any sane beginner would start.

Still, it’s important to know what’s out there. And, moreover, see just how far one can go these days if you truly want to explore the universe—or teach it to others—once you’ve moved beyond the simple, undeniable beauty of seeing the cosmos with the unaided eye.