 A relatively smoke-free sunset at Clear Lake, in Riding Mountain National Park. For one week every year, I get to experience a truly dark sky – a 1 or at worst a 2 on the 9-level Bortle scale. At Riding Mountain National Park, near the western edge of Manitoba in the Canadian prairie, the night sky can be so perfectly black, but so alive with glittering, colorful stars, that I can imagine what it might be like to gaze up from the surface of the Moon. Not this year. The cause: wildfires, burning with unprecedented ferocity in unusually hot, dry forests of northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Vast plumes of wildfire smoke have wafted south all summer, blotting out the stars (and making it painful to breathe). It’s sad to think that, just a few years ago, I never worried that smoke would keep me from using a telescope. Now, it’s a fact of life – a new reality that didn’t need to be. As a professor who often studies climate change, it's a sobering thought. Now, there were a couple nights at Riding Mountain when the wind shifted to blow from the south, holding off the worst wildfire plumes. On one of those nights, I slipped outside with my Vespera Pro. To my dismay, I could just barely make out the ribbon of the Milky Way, undulating across a sky that was far from the velvety black I’ve grown used to. What’s worse, the Vespera would not track anything. As I huddled in a shadow near our rental cottage, I tried the Trifid Nebula, then the Eagle Nebula, then the Dumbbell Nebula and the Hercules Cluster, all to no avail. It was now well past 1 AM, and I was getting desperate. Mosquitoes, no longer daunted by repeated applications of bug spray, were beginning to bite me in droves.  A disastrous night with the Vespera Pro. And it was dangerous. Riding Mountain is a wild place. There are well over a thousand bears in the park, not to mention wolves, cougars, and other animals that could easily kill an amateur astronomer. I couldn’t see anything, and I imagined that every creak and crunch was animal stalking closer. Finally, I gave up. What had happened? Why did my Vespera fail now, and not in the light-polluted DC sky? Eventually, I found the reason: I had failed to input my new GPS coordinates. I’d assumed – foolishly – that the telescope automatically detected its location. Back in Winnipeg, I waited for a clear night between wildfire plumes. Finally, it came, though atmospheric transparency stayed low. I just wanted to check whether the Vespera would work when I’d entered the right coordinates. To my chagrin, it did – and I took a mediocre exposure of the Hercules Globular Cluster that was still better than anything I’d managed with another smart telescope.  A look at the Hercules Globular Cluster under a hazy, smoky, light-polluted sky. Any look at the Hercules Cluster – M13 – is always a little special. As I wrote several years ago, I often think of the Arecibo Message, a radio signal beamed towards M13 on November 16th, 1974. In about 25,000 years, that message will reach the approximately 500,000 stars in the cluster. Any listeners will learn about human physiology and technology – and they’ll receive a map of the solar system. In another 25,000 years, something on Earth may receive a response. Our distant descendants, I hope. In any case, after arriving home from Canada, we travelled to the coast in Delaware – another annual ritual. It’s not as dark there as it usually is in Riding Mountain (I’d give it about a 5 on that 9-level Bortle scale), but still, our beach trip is usually my next chance in the year to observe beyond our light-polluted DC skies. Readers will know that I tested the EVScope 1 and 2 during these Delaware getaways, and both had their virtues. This time, I tried the Vespera Pro, and of course I was sure to enter the right coordinates. On the final night of our stay, the sky cleared. Transparency and seeing were both about average, but the stars seemed a good deal brighter than they had in Riding Mountain. Mercifully, no wildfire smoke had made it this far south. At about 11:30, I activated the telescope just as the Andromeda Galaxy emerged out from behind a nearby building. As I reclined in a sunroom, drinking mead, I began a long exposure. A great thing about the Vespera app, Singularity, is that it works in the background while you’re checking the internet, for example, or writing an email. A less great thing, perhaps, is that there’s a mismatch between the time the telescope focuses on a target – such as the Andromeda Galaxy – and the exposure time provided by the app. I found the time was consistently about 30% off, so that a 30-minute exposure actually took 45 minutes. It’s something to consider when planning a night of observing. In any case, a 33-minute exposure of the Andromeda Galaxy yielded the following result:  A 33-minute exposure with the Vespera Pro in Milton, Delaware. This is very close to the raw image. I’ve made a few small adjustments in my Pixelmator Pro software – mostly just denoising – but this is what you can expect under a suburban sky with the Vespera Pro. It is, by far, the best picture I’ve taken or anything other than the Moon. I was delighted to capture detail in Andromeda’s satellite, the dwarf elliptical M110, at the top left of the image. And just think: there are probably more than a trillion stars in this picture, shining at us with light that’s two and a half million years old. It boggles the mind. And then consider that those stars are rushing towards us at 110 kilometers per second. Someday, they might join the stars in the Milky Way to form one giant elliptical galaxy – though a recent study suggests that Andromeda might just sail past us instead. What a sight that will be. Anyway, after taking this exposure I decided to forego sleep and image my favorite deep space object: the Triangulum Galaxy. I don’t know why I love it so much. Perhaps because it’s so ignored, compared to Andromeda, despite being a gigantic star city in its own right: at 60,000 light years across, the third-largest member (by far) in our local group of galaxies. This time, I took a 30-minute exposure while downing the last of my mead. The result satisfied me even more than my shot of Andromeda. Again, I’ve done little more than eliminate a bit of noise from the following shot.  A 30-minute exposure of the Triangulum Galaxy with the Vespera Pro. To my astonishment, it’s been five years since I took my first electronically-assisted telescope – the EVScope 1 – to the beach in Delaware. It was a frightening time, for many reasons, but I still remember my delight at the blurry pictures in the telescope’s eyepiece. No, it wasn't quite the same as using my Takahashi refractors, but I felt new possibilities opening before me: the broader universe, beyond our solar system, that had previously felt just out of reach. The Vespera Pro is less expensive than the EVScope was (or than the EVScope 2 remains today). It’s worth reflecting on just how much the technology has improved. The slideshow below alternates my 2020 EVScope exposures of the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies with the exposures I just took with the Vespera Pro. Note the much broader field of view provided by the Vespera - a must when imaging large, diffuse objects, such as nearby galaxies. It's true that you could still take better astrophotographs by making your own rig, and you could probably do it with less money. It's also true that, if I ever get around to learning how to use astrophotography software, such as PixInsight, my Vespera photographs would get that much better.
I suspect that, in another five years, electronically assisted, smart telescopes will match the performance of custom rigs - and they'll be a whole lot easier to use. Even if that never happens, it's clear that such telescopes, once widely derided as a fad, will have a place, perhaps even a dominant place, among amateur astronomy equipment.
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