Month: May 2024

The Unistellar Odyssey smart telescope made me question what stargazing means

The age-old pursuit of looking at the heavens is finally getting an upgrade.

Two telescopes on a forest path

Enlarge / The Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro and the Unistellar Odyssey Pro. (credit: Tim Stevens)

It's been 300 years since Galileo and Isaac Newton started fiddling around with lenses and parabolic mirrors to get a better look at the heavens. But if you look at many of the best amateur telescopes today, you'd be forgiven for thinking they haven't progressed much since.

Though components have certainly improved, the basic combination of mirrors and lenses is more or less the same. Even the most advanced "smart" mounts that hold them rely on technology that hasn't progressed in 30 years.

Compared to the radical reinvention that even the humble telephone has received, it's sad that telescope tech has largely been left behind. But that is finally changing. Companies like Unistellar and Vaonis are pioneering a new generation of scopes that throw classic astronomy norms and concepts out the window in favor of a seamless setup and remarkable image quality.

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Betriebssystem Retrofit: Wie Windows XP auf den i486 kommt

Windows XP braucht eigentlich einen Pentium-Prozessor. Das liegt an nur einem Assembler-Befehl; ein Bastler ersetzte diesen. Wir erklären die Hintergründe. Ein Deep Dive von Johannes Hiltscher (Betriebssysteme, Microsoft)

Windows XP braucht eigentlich einen Pentium-Prozessor. Das liegt an nur einem Assembler-Befehl; ein Bastler ersetzte diesen. Wir erklären die Hintergründe. Ein Deep Dive von Johannes Hiltscher (Betriebssysteme, Microsoft)