Anyone doing photometry with the Celestron Origin?

Technology Instrumentation & Equipment
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Has anyone started doing any photometry with the new Celestron Origin? I haven’t seen much on the topic other than a brief article from Richard Berry quoted on Celestron’s website (Using the Celestron Origin for Science | Celestron). The article is positive but very short and doesn’t go into much detail. I’m curious if anyone has tried and would love to hear about their experiences.

One thing in particular I was wondering about is the “clear” filter that comes with the scope. I read someone say that this served as an IR cut filter (which to the best of my knowledge is an important thing to have for accurate photometry) but I don’t know if that’s accurate or not and haven’t been able to find anything “official” on the subject yet. If it does not block IR then is it possible to just use an off the shelf IR/UV cut filter in the Origin? I’ve read that very fast optics may not work well with filters not specifically designed for them, and the Origin in an f/2.2. (The only filter that Celestron sells specifically for the Origin is a nebula filter.)

Thanks,
Brian

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Google ‘Celestron blog Origin Richard Berry’. You should find a link to the blog.

Roy

1 Like
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Hi Brian,
Richard recently started mentoring an AAVSO member with an Origin, so I know of at least two people who are doing photometry with it. If there is enough interest in this topic, we could consider starting a special interest group.

It should be noted that AAVSO also has a Smart Telescope Working Group that is developing tools and guidance for how to use these devices for science. This group is chaired by @mcraig and @mark_munkacsy . That group is making good progress developing an application that vastly simplifies the photometric pipeline for smart telscopes.

Until that is done, my advice has been to look at the DSLR Photometry Manual because smart telescopes are fairly similar. The CCD/CMOS observing guide may also have some advice.

Brian

1 Like
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Hi Brian,
Thanks for the info, that’s very helpful. I’m glad that the AAVSO is looking into developing guidance for the use of smart telescopes for photometry as I think that would be of interest to many people (myself included, obviously).

Regards,
Brian

5

Hello folks,
I’m brand new here and this is my first attempted post.

I’ve owned a few “smart telescopes” since early in 2022. I started with the Vaonis Stellina, then a Vaonis Vespera II for a short while, and I purchased a Celestron Origin a couple of months ago.

My reason for coming here is to ask if one can do “visual” observations and estimates using the Origin in real-time mode, without doing any stacking of images?

Right now, I have no experience with post-processing any of my images. I’ve only used my smart scopes for “observing” from my Bortle 5 driveway.

It appears that I would have to learn some sort of image processing to do photometry, but what about just “visual” observing and estimating?

Thanks very much, in advance, for any advice or pointers you may be able to offer!

smp

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Hi smp,

Welcome to the forums!

For a while, AAVSO accepted VISDIG (visually estimated from digital image) observations; however, we discontinued that practice several years ago.

We are still a few months away from having our smart telescope application ready for deployment. Until that application is ready, our official guidance is to look through the DSLR photometry manual and try using one of the many photometry software programs on the market.

Brian

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Thanks very much for the info, Brian.
I’ve already started reading up in the DSLR manual.
smp

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Hi Brian K.,

Can you give us any preview of what the smart telescope application will look like and what functionality it might have?

Thanks,
Brian S.

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Unfortunately, it is still a bit too early to provide these details.

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How is the smart telescope software development coming?

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Hi Jerry,

The software to extract instrumental magnitudes from images produced by smart telescopes is complete. The software that would accept these data and calibrate them on aavso.org is still in progress.

Over the last few months, the team has mostly focused on the different performance characteristics of smart telescopes. Some of them appear to be processing the raw images before saving them to disk.

Brian