News

It's the best time of 2024 to view and image planet Uranus - and astronomers have just found found our one visit there in 1986 by a NASA spacecraft was when the ice giant planet was having a bad hair day.     

BINTEL's long time telescope and optical wizard, Don Whiteman, has some handy advice for cleaning your binos -and the best part is you don't need anything too special and it can be done by anyone at home!Cleaning my Binoculars I’ve been out looking for the comet in the evening sky and roaming around in the morning twilight looking for that elusive bird and when I came back inside I noticed that my good binos have gunk on them and marks on the lens from outside and fingerprints.How the hell do I clean them back to pristine, keeping my bino’s clean is fairly easy and can be done with household thingys. (Yes, that's a technical term.) Chuck Wipes at Woolies First thing to do is give them a wipe off with a cloth, if they are waterproof use a Chux soaked in warm soapy water (wring it out well first) wipe over the outside of the body of the bino’s, if there’s sand or dirt in the shoulder joint use a hurricane blower to puff it off, wiping could accidentally scratch the lenses. We use Bintel Cleaning Solution for the lenses, you can use Windex in place of it. BINTEL UHTC Cleaning Solution First blow any dust particles off the glass with your hurricane blower. Hurricane Blower at BINTEL You can also use compressed air, but make sure it\'s compressed in a car - not from a mechanical compressor like those found in a workshop or even to power airbrushes.  These can spray small amounts of oil and lubricants onto your optical surfaces. This is the "air in a can" spray we used at BINTEL for cleaning away dust and grit. Jaycar Dust Remover Spray Can You can get it from Jaycar stores. The reason for blowing away dust and grit rather than wiping it away it is to avoid scratching the lenses. Once you\'ve blown away as much as possible spray a little cleaning solution /windex onto a couple of plain soft (unscented) tissues and gently wipe the objective lenses first (they’re the big lenses at the front, then twist or fold the eyecups down and using another couple of tissues with a light spray of our cleaning liquid gently wipe the eye lenses. Do this gently and don\'t rub hard. Let the cleaning solution do the work for you. You might need to do this a few times until you see all the stains and muck removed from the lenses. The reason we use unscented, plain tissues is because they minimal scents and moisturisers which might smear on the lenses The type of tissues we use at BINTEL for bino cleaning - nothing fancy. If you’ve been down near the ocean then it is slightly different method. Salt crystal , ever present in the air near the ocean dries on you bino’s, on the body just clean with the Chux, but with the lenses we need to be a little more careful as salt crystal however minute it may be can easily scratch the coated surfaces of the binos and we don’t want this to happen. So we dampen out tissue with water or cleaning solution and we crunch it up and lightly pat the glass, because as soon as the water/ solution hits the salt crystals they will dissolve and no longer a danger to t your coatings. Now get another tissue and clean them as described above.Leave them out to dry and later on put them back in their pouch or case until your next adventure.NB: At work we call Bintel Cleaning Solution, Jungle Juice, sounds meatier.CheersDon WhitemanBINTEL16th Oct 2024    

News about a newly discovered sungrazing comet that could be quite spectacular if it survives its close encounter with the Sun,

BINTEL's initial shipments of the Celestron Origin Intelligent Home Observatory, the new high end smart telescope by Celestron has quickly sold out. More are on the way and expected at BINTEL in November 2024. You can secure one with a 25% deposit and find our more via the link below: On the left is the Lagoon Nebula taken with a Celestron Origin from light polluted suburban Melbourne,  and on the right, the same image with some processing performed in-house by BINTEL to reveal additional details. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 8th September 2024

With whale watching season underway and winter scenery on offer, pop into to see BINTEL if you’re seeking out the best possible spotting scope to take full advantage of your views and travels. Our retail premises in Glebe, on the edge of the Sydney is the only place in Australia where you can try and compare for yourself from a wide of the best spotting scopes available. Zeiss Harpia 95 Angled 23-70x with Eye piece ZEISS HARPIA 95 ANGLED 23-70X SPOTTING SCOPE WITH EYEPIECE $6,698.00Add to cart This is a large, 95mm spotting scope with renowned ZEISS optics with FL and other advanced glass components. It’s also weatherproof and well suited to less than ideal conditions. Swarovski ATX 30-70×95 Spotting Scope Swarovski Optik is famous for producing high end binoculars and spotting scopes to suit even the most demanding requirements of bird watchers, wildlife observers and nature lovers. At BINTEL, we’ve been Swarovski dealers for several decades and have numerous customers who have used their beloved “Swaros” for 10, 20 or more years. The Swarovski ATX spotting scope range is module, meaning you can swap out eyepiece and main optics modules as well as adding DSLR camera adaptors and more. Kowa 55 mm Angled spotter with eyepiece 15-45x zoom KOWA 55 MM ANGLED SPOTTER WITH EYEPIECE 15-45X ZOOM $2,100.00BACKORDER Stepping down a little in size but not in quality is the Kowa TSN-553. This is a small spotting scope, with a 55mm diameter main lens. It means it doesn’t have quite the reach into the distance of the two ZEISS and Swarovski larger spotting scopes mentioned above. It does however feature fluorite crystal main lens that delivers stunningly crisp and clear views.  It also has a beautiful “made in Japan” quality throughout. The Kowa TSN-533 also  far lighter and might be a good option if you’re after a spotting scope that can more easily moved around or to take travelling with you. Which one is right for me? We often have customers  tell us their spent hours researching various products on the web, watching YouTube reviews and more, yet end up purchasing  different binoculars or spotting scopes than what they originally decided on once they try in person and talk to one our friendly optical experts in person. At this level of quality optics,  you’re going to experience years if not decades of some of the best quality viewing available.  If you have great views other at home or when during your travels, have a chat with us to help make the most of them! Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 6th June 2024 PS: For an excellent value but high quality spotting scope, we suggest you also have a look through the Pentax Spotting Scope PF-80 EDA . This features “ED” glass for sharp images and we also have some options for eyepieces to deliver a range of magnifications.

The Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 6″ is an ideal telescope for observing Saturn and Jupiter – plus lots more! The Celestron StarSense Explorer range has certainly made the Universe vastly more accessible in recent years.  Across all models, they feature a very clever gizmo that runs a custom Celestron app that turns your phone in a celestial navigation device. Much like using your phone to map your journey in a car, the Celestron StarSense Explore system shows you where to move your telescope to in order to find Solar System planets like Saturn, Jupiter or Mars as well as thousands of deep-sky objects including nebulae and star clusters. Heading outside the Milky Way, the StarSense Explorer will also offer the chance to view galaxies millions of light years away. You’ll even be be offered your own personal astro tour for the evening if you not sure what to look.  We’ve sold probably thousands of Celestron StarSense Explorer based telescopes in the last several years and had positive feedback from our customers. We mentioned this $1199 special on the Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 6 a few weeks ago in the BINTEL newsletter and we’re now down to our last couple of dozen at this price.

  There’s something strange going on with the planets on the outer edge of the Solar System…. For centuries, astronomers have been using slight oddities in the motion of  known planets to uncover other planets. Probably the most famous of these was the discovery of the outer gas giant, Neptune, which was found  in 1846 after its position in the sky was calculated by Urbain Le Verrier in Paris as well as being independently  by John Couch Adams in Cambridge, UK.  These calculations were based on slight variations in the orbit of the planet Uranus, itself only confirmed as a planet 1781.  While Uranus was discovered by William Hershel through repeated observations that picked up on the planet’s movement against the background of Milky Way stars, Neptune was hunted down based on the fact that the orbit of Uranus wasn’t quite right.  Urbain Le Verrier and others thought that there was something beyond  Uranus that was causing these orbital variations. As it turned out – they were right. Using Le Verrier’s calculations, Neptune was found less than one degree from its predicted position by a telescope at the Berlin Observatory.  As anyone who has looked at Neptune through even a smallish telescope will realise it’s simply not that hard to see. Both Uranus and Neptune had been observed by astronomers going back as far as Galileo, however they were not recognised as planets. Their movement against the background stars wasn’t enough to draw attention.   From Galileo’s notebooks from the night of December 27th and 28th 1612 where he recorded Jupiter and its moons along with several background stars – one of which was Neptune.  The discovery in 1930 of the first of the, what are now called, trans-Neptunian objects (TNO), Pluto, was more of a search, rather than predicting an object to be in a certain location.  It took until 1992 for the discovery of the next TNO , and now over 3,000 bodies, of a wide range of sizes, orbiting the Sun in the outer reaches of the Solar System have been found.  Astronomers estimate that there’s many more of these TNOs or “dwarf planets” to be discovered.  While Pluto will always be  “The People’s Planet” for lots of folks, the vast collection of the same type of rocky bodies extending into space hundreds of times the distance of the Earth to the Sun made it hard to continue to group Pluto with the planets comparatively closer to the Sun. After all, if Pluto is a planet, then why isn’t <insert the name of your favourite TNO> as well? Please note that all the planets out to Neptune are visible in even small telescopes, and a larger amateur telescope will show you Pluto (which appears simply as a very faint star and not that interesting), you won’t be able to spot these TNOs visually. We need to have  bit of dive into the scale of the Solar System. One term you might read about is the Astronomical Unit or “AU”. It’s the average distance that the Earth to the Sun and it’s a smidge under 150 million km. We can say the Earth orbits at one AU, Mars is about 1.5 AU and Jupiter at around 5 AU. Saturn is at 9.5 AU, Uranus at 20 AU and Neptune at 30 AU. This might sound like a mind boggling distance – thirty times as far from the Sun as the Earth is –  but we’re only getting started. The first TNO, Pluto, orbits the Sun at between 30 and 49 AU. Makemake’s 306 year rotation around the Sun is between roughly 38 and 52 AU, and Eris between 38 and 90 AU. But again – we’re just getting started. Astronomers are now looking at data around the orbits of a group of these TNOs, which have long, looping orbits, and are referred to as ETNOs (Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects). They have long looping orbits, which bring some of them within 150 AU and then some  out to as far several hundred AU. The Earth, by comparison, has an almost circular orbit around the Sun. A diagram showing some of the main ENTOs (Extreme Trans-Uranian Objects) Why are these ETNOs of interest? Apart from the discovery and cataloguing of these small, rocky bodies at vast distances, are they of any real interest?  After all, none of  of them will ever be visited by a spacecraft in our lifetimes, and possibly not for several generations! First of all, they’re all too distant to have their orbits influenced in any real way by known solar system bodies. However, multiple observations point towards these remote bodies slightly clustering together, towards a larger distant body – in much the same way Neptune was discovered by how it influenced the movement of Uranus, which started with the discovery of Sedna in 2004. Even more tantalising, the outer Solar System body that’s influencing the orbits of these ETNOs, is calculated to be really massive. Professor Mike Brown (yes, the same Mike Brown who lead the charge to boot Pluto from the roster of planets) and Konstantin Batygin put forward the idea of Planet 9, a massive body with a mass somewhere between the Earth and Uranus orbiting. Estimates of distance put Planet 9 around 500 and 600 AU from the Sun. How massive? Current estimate of the mass needed to cause the observed strangeness of the Solar System bodies out past Neptune, that of a large planet, possibly at least 7 times the mass of the Earth. This is not another planet in the TNO community, the largest found so far being  Pluto, which is just  0.2% of the Earth’s mass. Planet 9 is something very different. How did it form? There’s a number of ways a large body that far out, on the outer edges of the Solar System, could end up being there.  First of all, it could have formed there. This is unlikely as there is simply not enough matter on the fringes of the Solar System to clump together under gravity, or “accrete” and form a planet of this size.  The Solar System we see today is relatively stable but could have come under the influence of a passing star, that gravitationally ripped a planet from the orbit where it formed, and flung it to the edges of the Solar System. However, we haven’t, to date, found any other distortions in the orbits of other major planets to confirm this has happened. Another possibility is Planet 9 is an interstellar body that was captured by the Solar System, as it was passing on its own through interstellar space.  We’ve touch on rogue planets before, and they’re thought to exist in vast numbers.  These are planets that do not orbit a host star like the Earth, Mars or Saturn does, but instead orbit the Milky Way on their own. Illustration of what Planet 9 could look like. Robin Dienel/ Carnegie Institution of Washington Where is it? Astronomers including Brown and Batygin along with Matthew Holman, earlier in 2024, released results from a long survey taken with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) observatory in Hawaii. The team scanned 78% of the likely region of the sky where Planet 9 might be found with no success. To test their techniques, they also seeded 50,000 “fake” Planet 9 data points and their processes spotted 99.99% of them. The remaining region of approx. 22% is further away, and will need more powerful observing tools. Brown , Batygin and Holman are currently working with data from larger telescopes in Hawaii. Other searches including citizen science projects have not found Planet  9 either. What else could it be? Astronomers Jakub Scholtz and James Unwin have another idea about Planet 9. Along with others, they theorised that a large numbers of micro black holes were formed early on in the history of the Universe, called primordial black holes or PBH, and Planet 9 could be a small black hole.  For it to be the mass that’s causing the anomalies observed  – i.e. around 7 times the mass of the Earth – a small PBH would only need to be around the size of a cricket ball.  (It’s not the size of the object disturbing orbits – it’s the mass.) With no matter nearby to fall into or accrete into a  PBH, and emit energy as it does, we’d be extremely hard pressed to spot it apart.  Microlensing events – light from behind massive objects being bent  – might be a way to determine if this is the case. Astronomers Ann-Marie Madigan and Michael McCourt suggested Planet 9 might be an unseen ring of material, similar to that seen in other system, and there’s also been theories about Planet 9 being a collection of dark matter. When will we know If the current data survey of the remaining 22% of the Solar System where Planet 9 could be located draws a blank, the final confirmation might be made using one of the upcoming new generation “mega” telescopes such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is due to start scientific operation in 2025, as we talked about in a previous blog article. “Within a year of that telescope operating, I think we’ll find it,” Professor Mike Brown has said. “We have spent centuries studying the giant planets that we have. Imagine we get a new one all of a sudden. All the things we’ve done for studying the giant planets, we get to do all over again for the first time.” Wrapping it up…. While not accepted by every  astronomer, the concept of a large body on the outside of the Solar System influencing the orbits of ETNOs has wide support and the searches will continue to find out what exactly what it is. It’s one of the many mysteries still remaining in astronomy.  When it’s finally tracked down you won’t have to worry about where to find out more – it’ll be front page news around the world! Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 2nd July 2024 PS: As usual, this is an introduction to a complex and developing topic. Drop me a message at BINTEL if you’d like more information or comment.

Bintel are the major sponsor for this years Astronomy open night !

It’s no secret that we’re all very fond of the DWARF II Smart Telescope here at BINTEL. Some of our staff have even purchased one for their own personal use! Overnight, our friends at DWARF Lab announced their new telescope, which is unsurprisingly called the DWARF 3. This is a considerable upgrade to the DWARF II while keeping the things that made the DWARF II such a popular gizmo – it’s small size and extreme portability. The new DWARF 3 on the left compared with the original DWARF II on the right What was upgraded? There’s probably two major factors that will make a big difference to astrophotographers as well as bird photographers and nature fans in general. The first is an increase in the size of the main lens. DWARF have increased the aperture of their new, APO style lens from 24mm to 35mm. This will mean more detail for both astro and terrestrial images. If you’re thinking of the DWARF 3 for wildlife or scenery, the new lenses mean it’s roughly equal to a DSLR 737mm telephoto lens and a 45mm wide angle lens. The camera sensor has also received a major upgrade to a Sony IMX 678 Starvis with a bump in pixel size. This brings longer exposures with less background noise. Full support for EQ mode shooting as well as DWARF enabling astro imaging with the wide angle lens point to the DWARF 3 as possibly being a fantastic gizmo for large scale, Milky Way and night sky panorama photography. While it probably won’t replace for everyone the conventional way of taking these sorts of images (say a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2i + a tripod + your DSLR camera and lens), the portability of the DWARF 3 might make a handy companion for nightscape fans. The DWARF 3 mosaic mode with the option for EQ mounting also means it will be capable of imaging larger deep-sky nebulae and clusters.  Maximum single exposure has also been increased to 60 seconds. Included are new filters to help improve both daytime and night time photography as well. These also include a Duo-band filter to assist with taking astro images in areas with light pollution . They’re also internal and can be selected by the DWARF app. External Solar filters for photographing the Sun are included, as they were with the DWARF II deluxe package. The DWARF app  itself has also received a major boost. There’s AI powered noise reduction to help bring out the details on the image captured by the telescope. This handy when you have to take astro photos in light polluted or not perfectly clear nights. DWARF have also implemented “One-Click Shooting” that leaves behind many of the complexities normally associated with astrophotography to help beginners start their astro imaging journey. However manual control over just about every aspect of the imaging process is still on offer for more experienced folks including file export to not just JPG, PNG but also TIFF and even FITS. The new Astro Plan feature also lets you plan an entire evening of astrophotography ahead of time and then simply leave the DWARF 3 to do its thing while you snooze. (And yes, you can leave the DWARF 3 out in the open with its new IP54 weather proofing.) There also new features that will especially appeal to bird watchers. The DWARF 3 will not just follow a bird as the DWARF II currently does, but will use both cameras to re-locate the bird if it suddenly takes flight and automatically continue to track it. Species identification has been added as well. There’s an extended “giga pixel” panorama feature to let you build massive, large images that can be zoomed in into to see details.  Basically, the astro mosaic feature but for daytime and landscape photography. There are a few other changes such as larger internal memory and built-in battery as opposed to the removable battery of the DWARF II.   Despite these changes including the big bump in the lens size, the DWARF 3 is only around a 100g heavier than the DWARF II and only a few mm larger on all sides. It will only come in one version that will include a bag and accessories. We’ll give the DWARF 3 a thorough test of all the new hardware and software features as soon as we can. However, from what we’ve seen so far, the DWARF 3 looks like a very impressive little telescope. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 31st May 2024

When was it? The peak of the Great Aurora of 2024 occurred around the 10th,  11th and 12th of May 2024 depending on where you were . Aurora, or lights in the parts of the Earth’s atmosphere which are usually only seen in regions closer to the north and south pole, were seen in much of southern Australia and across New Zealand, with some reports of Aurora being seen even in Queensland! What causes Aurora? The frequency and size of sunspots seen on the surface of our nearest star – the Sun – change over an approx. 11 year period. We’re heading in the period of peak  activity called  Solar Maximum. Sunspots appear like as darker regions compared to the rest of the Sun’s disk but are in fact areas of intense storms of magnetically charged plasma particles. (This is a very simplified explanation of the complex changes seen on the Sun’s surface. On any clear day, pop into BINTEL and we’ll show you the Sun through a dedicated Solar Telescope and explain more.) Sunspots can  produce loops of plasma that crash back onto the Sun’s surface,  send out ultraviolet light and x-rays that can play havoc with satellites and communication.  Such radiation travels at the speed of light and impacts the Earth only a few minutes after it’s emitted from the Sun. The Earth is surrounded by a  series of our own magnetic fields which are called the magnetosphere. This protects us from harmful radiation from the Sun as well as from other sources further out into space. The Sun can also eject charge particles during these storms. These are streams of material, not different wavelengths of “light” like high energy ultraviolet or x-rays and travel far more slowly.  They take some hours or days to reach the Earth and if aimed just right and interact with the magnetosphere, will cause the Aurora.  This stream of particles is called a Coronal Mass Ejection or CME.  If lined up towards Earth, particles in a CME from the Sun will strike the magnetosphere and be directed into the upper regions of the Earth’s atmosphere. The atoms in the atmosphere are “excited” by these particles from the Sun slamming into them and release energy as photons or light as we see it. What did we see? Why all the different colours? The different colours seen in Aurora are the due to different gasses in our atmosphere, much like the different colours seen in old school neon lights.   You’ll be able to see a all these different colours in our customer photos below.) Green – the most common colour seen in Aurora as our eyes are sensitive to this part of the spectrum.  This happens when CME particles interact with oxygen at around 100 to 300kms altitude Red – interactions with oxygen at higher altitude, from  300 to 400kms Pink/red – this produced by nitrogen at approx 100km. Blue or purple – particles hitting helium and hydrogen right on the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere as these gases are the lightest and float above other elements of the atmosphere. The colours are hard to see against a dark sky background, however there’s some images below showing them. Does a CME needs to be a direct hit to cause an Aurora? Yes.  Many of the Solar storms we see emit CMEs in all different directions. We won’t see the particles as they travel through the Solar System unless they interact with something in their path. Why was this such as massive display of Aurora? Solar storms are measured by various scales. Think of these as similar to cyclones or earthquake measurements.  One common scale is the G Scale. The most severe of these G5 – are rare events. The Great Aurora of 2024 was produce by a G5 geomagnetic storm The last time a G5 even occurred was in 2003. (As I’m writing this, we’re  at G0 geomagnetic conditions with a slight change a  G1) From the 7th to the 11th of May at least seven CMEs headed towards Earth including from the sunspot group AR3664 pictured below taken by Franco Fantasia & Guiseppe Conzo. Aren’t Aurora normally only seen much closer to the Earth’s polar regions? Yes! Due to the shape of the Earth’s magnetic field lines, nearly all of the charged particles from the Sun’s CME are directed into the atmosphere near the North and South poles. In the case of this event, the intensity of the CME was so massive that Aurora was visible at latitudes that have never seen them in living memory. Will it happen again?  How big was this event? There’s no doubt this was a rare event! We’re unable to predict exactly when aurora will occur in the future with any certainty but we can get a heads up on likely aurora based on our observations of the Sun.  As mentioned, the surface of the Sun is becoming more active during Solar maximum and more frequent and strong aurora are expected. The events of a few weeks are quite rare and it compares with major aurora events in past decades. Some commentators are suggesting that the aurora seen recently were more widespread and widely seen than any aurora of the last 500 years! It’s the only G5 event since the availability of smartphone (the last one being in 2003) and there’s a strong possibility of there being more photos of the Great Aurora of 2024 than all other auroras put together. How I keep an eye on aurora events and get involved? One citizen science project is Aurorasaurus located here.  This projects tracks aurora in real-time based on local reports and send you updates.  It helps scientists to build valuable data on aurora to build into space weather models and theories. The Australian Space Weather Alert System located here will you updated with current Solar conditions, news and expected events. The US government’s Space Weather Prediction Center located here is also a key resource. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 22nd May 2024