Unistellar Wants To Bring Dark Sky Stargazing to the Heart of the City

Catching the astronomy bug can be easy: Simply look up at night. Or better yet, train a modestly powered telescope on the Moon, a star, or a faint-but-glorious Messier object such as the Orion Nebula.

But basic stargazing is getting harder as light pollution becomes more prevalent. A study published in January in the journal Science found that the glow of light pollution is increasing by 10.4 percent each year in North America. Combine that with the fact that a growing percentage of people live in cities, where light pollution is most intense, and you realize that the majority of people don’t have access to the night sky the way they did for countless generations.

Smart telescope-maker Unistellar, however, may have a solution that will allow stargazers to access the universe from wherever they live. The company recently announced a new software update, called Deep Dark Technology, for its smart telescopes that uses the data collected by their users to process the image captured by the telescope in real time, minimizing light pollution and allowing brighter, clearer views of celestial objects — even in urban settings.

“More people live in the city, so we said, ‘let’s create an algorithm so we get rid of the light pollution,’” SETI Institute astronomer and Unistellar co-founder Franck Marchis told SpaceRef. “And that has been our focus for the past two years, basically.” He added that the company has tested Deep Dark technology in particularly dense (and brightly lit) cities including “Las Vegas, out in the middle of San Francisco, New York City, and we have seen an improvement of the image quality.”

Founded in 2017, Unistellar makes smart telescopes — the eVscope 2 and eQuinox2 — that are designed to make it easier to view celestial objects. The motorized scopes use software to align with a target object, but go a step further than other telescopes and use electronic sensors and eyepieces instead of a traditional viewing lens — when you peer through a Unistellar telescope, you’re viewing a small screen that displays the image, rather than seeing the light capture by the optics directly. That allows Unistellar to use image processing to create a clearer image, and now, with the Deep Dark Technology algorithm, to turn down the effects of light pollution as well.

“People send observations to us and we use them to learn how to improve the image processing,” Marchis explained. So far, he added, the company has collected “terabytes and terabytes of observations” from users over the past four-plus years

Unistellar’s approach will allow amateur astronomers clearer views of their celestial targets, and not just because it can mitigate light pollution, according to Cornell University astronomer James Lloyd. Electronic sensors are much better at gathering faint light than a human eye, and “to look at faint objects through a telescope without this kind of increased sensitivity is quite difficult,” Lloyd told SpaceRef. “You have to be outside for a long time in a very dark place. You have to let your eyes fully dark adapt.

“It actually takes a fair bit of practice to know how to get your eye in just the right place in a telescope,” he added.

The Unistellar telescopes may rankle purists, however, in that its telescopes place an intermediary between the observer and the light that has traveled, in some cases, millions of years to reach their eyeballs.

“There’s the sort of question here of, ‘What is important?’” Lloyd said. “Is it the fact that your retina is receiving the light from the astronomical object directly? Or is it the experience that you’re having?”

That said, Lloyd added, professional astronomers haven’t peered into an optical eyepiece for their work in nearly a century — the high-powered telescopes and instruments used for astronomical research have long relied on electronic displays as well.

“So half of me is totally on the side of that purist thing, ‘Ahh, you’re just looking at a computer screen,’” he said. “But then the other half of me is like, yeah, no, it’s all good. If you’re enjoying the experience, then it’s great.”

Ease of enjoyment is key to Unistellar’s design philosophy, according to Marchis.

“What is important for us is that the people take the telescopes out and use them more,” he said. “Because the best telescope is a telescope that you use.”

Marchis’s favorite target while using a Unistellar scope? Any galaxy, but especially the Triangulum Galaxy, Messier 33, which can be seen from Earth and exhibits brilliant spiral arms similar to those of our own Milky Way galaxy.

“It’s a beautiful object,” Marchis said. “I mean, it will literally blow your mind.”

“Every time I look at a galaxy, I always think about the fact that maybe there is someone in this galaxy observing me as well,” he added. “Someone that may be smart and intelligent, who invented a telescope like ours, and they are observing us as well. This is a moment of connection, a cosmic connection that I like.”