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Always want to discover the Universe? BINTEL takes the confusion out of buying a telescope for you or the family. Get REAL advice for telescope buying for Christmas 2024.

One of the favourite deep southern sky object, the Large Magellanic Cloud or LMC, has long been regarded as a satellite galaxy of our own but now thought by many to be just passing by - and has the scars from the encounter.

It's been an amazing year in the Smart Telescope arena. When I wrote the the 2023 BINTEL guide to Smart Telescopes almost 18 months ago, we knew they were becoming popular but even the crew here at BINTEL has been thrilled by new technologies and the wide variety of both new and experienced astronomers and nature fans who've flocked to these exciting devices. First of all, a quick recap - what exactly is a Smart Telescope? We generally think Smart Telescopes are all-in-one units that combine the telescope themselves, a fully computerised "GOTO" mount, camera and the associated tech needed to manage image capture and processing. This app looks after the alignment of the telescope in the night sky, which is done by  knowing where on the surface of the Earth it's located and performing a quick scan around the sky to get its position. Once this is done, you select what you'd like to view or photograph. Last year this was mainly carried out by selecting an astro object from the Smart Telescope app's database, but for 2024 we're also seeing further integration of comprehensive star atlases that lets you explore and photograph a vastly expanded selection of the night sky above our heads. Aside from a few specialised devices, you cannot "look through" a Smart Telescope. What it photographs will be seen on your device's screen. (More on this soon....) ZWO Seestar S50 When our 2023 Smart Telescope guide was published, the ZWO Seestar S50 had just been announced at the NEAF show in the USA. It began shipping some months later. Since then, they've become a global success story and we've sold a huge number of them here at BINTEL. For example, we've had multiple occasions where more than 100 of these little Seestar S50 have been shipped to customers on a single day.   If you're interested only in astro imaging, the ZWO Seestar S50  might be your best option for an affordable Smart Telescope.  It comes in a sturdy foam carry case, a table top tripod, internal filters and an external Solar photo for taking photos of the Sun and its sunspots. While it's now 18 months old, ZWO have offered multiple upgrades to the Seestar S50 via app updates with more on the way.  ZWO Seestar S30 This is the newest smart telescope, with full details only being released to the public on the 1st November 2024. The smallest member of the ZWO Seestar family carries many of the same design ideas as the larger S50 - all in one body, camera and telescope - and uses the same app to control it. It has a 30mm diameter main lens compared to 50mm on the Seestar S50. The S30 differs in two main areas compared to the S50. The physical size is much smaller than the S50 which makes it more travel friendly. ZWO are reminding everyone that the Seestar S30 weighs much less than a 2l bottle of soft drink. ZWO Seestar S30 - great size if you're travelling Full details of the ZWO Seestar S30 are available here. DWARF Lab  Our friends at DWARF Lab have been busy over the last 12 months! They produced and shipped the very popular DWARF II Smart Telescope.  This was smaller and even more portable than the ZWO Seestar S50  and while it didn't produce as detailed images as the S50, it could capture a wider field. It also found a home among bird watchers and nature photographers. The new DWARF 3 which has just started shipping brings a swag of new features. The DWARF 3 (left) compared to the DWARF II (right) - a smidge bigger but far more powerful Without a major increase in overall size, the DWARF 3 now has a 35mm vs 24mm main lens, more than doubling the telescope's light collecting ability compared to the DWARF II. The camera has also received a major upgrade to a Sony IMX678 sensor, a better battery and more. The DWARF 3 has also seen major software updates and capabilities including extended exposure time in EQ mode, image mosaics and improved automatic object tracking - useful for birds, planes, shootings stars and even maybe the odd UFO or two.... You can now also use the widefield camera for astronomy photos and this combined with the mosaic mode could see the DWARF 3 as an affordable yet capable alternative to the traditional DSRL and star tracker methods for photographing the Milky Way. Probably the best part of the upgrade to the DWARF 3 is they've kept the price pretty much the same as the DWARF II. We haven't seen too many telescope where the manufacturer increases the diameter of a model's optics by 40%, upgrades just about every feature of the outgoing model AND keeps the price the same. You can read about the DWARF 3 here. ZWO Seestar S50 or DWARF 3? If you're only interested in astro imaging, the slightly larger ZWO Seestar S50 still has an edge compared to the DWARF 3 for closer up and more detailed images. The arrival of mosaic features will blunt the advantage of the wider field of the DWARF 3.  However, the addition of astro features to the wide angle camera on the DWARF 3 for even larger panorama shots might be of interest to you. Plus even the slightly larger DWARF 3 is still much smaller than the ZWO Seestar S50 and this could be a factor for portability and travelling. Either way, there's simply no other other way for less than $900 to obtain the deep-sky astro photos that these two cool little devices can produce. ZWO Seestar S30 or DWARF 3? Ok, this is a much trickier problem! At the moment, the S30 is almost $200 cheaper than the DWARF 3 and this alone could be a deciding factor for some folks. The DWARF 3 has a better camera and its ability to be used more easily in EQ mode might see it producing better astro images than the S30.   Both of these tiny Smart Telescopes have dual lenses for wide field and close up images. The DWARF app has a number of features that make it appealing to nature and wildlife photographers, however ZWO is catching up in this area.  ZWO have also recently released to the public their version of mosaic capabilities for the Seestar app for both the S30 and S50. They call this feature framing and initial reports look good.  We haven't been able to put the DWARF 3 and the new S30 head to head ourselves and will be doing so soon. If you're unsure or just want to toss up a few ideas, please give BINTEL a call. We'll be more than happy to discuss all oof these entry level Smart Telescopes in detail.  Vespera II and Vespera Pro French company Vaonis produced one of the first Smart Telescopes, the Stellina which was followed up in 2023 by the original Vaonis Vespera. This device was larger than a ZWO Seestar S50,  oozed style and character and offered a significantly better optics and electronics. The Vaonis app and user interface is both more powerful and easier to use than offering offerings. In 2024, Vaonis has upgraded the Vespera to the Vespera II, as well as introducing the new Vespera Pro model. The Vaonis Vespera lineup for 2024 Cameras were a large part of the upgrades to the Vespera model for 2024. The Vespera II has a four-fold increase in megapixel size compare to the original Vespera and the new Vespera Pro has a further 50% bump on top of that. This has seen a large increase in the size of the images that can be produced. This has also brought the resolution or sampling down considerably allowing much finer details to be imaged.  The Vespera Pro can capture image details as small as 1.6 arc seconds. While versions of various mosaic or image stitching abilities are due to appear at some point on the the sub $1000 Smart Telescopes, the Vaonis CovalENS multi-imaging system is mature and fully featured.  This allows you to frame exactly the region you'd like to photograph and watch the large panorama build in real-time. For example, the Vespera II using CovalENS can photograph a patch of the night sky more than six Full Moons wide. UPDATE:2nd Oct 2024 - CovelENS gets an upgrade. Vaonis have released information on major updates to the software. Of interest to astrophotographers how like to produce images of faint objects  with intricate details will the new multi-night observation mode. This lets you shutdown your imaging session for the night and seamlessly re-commence photographing the object on the following or later night. There's also major updates to their mosaic image composition system and features to plan you  what you photograph during your imaging sessions. More on the Vaonis website here. Apart from the more powerful camera, extra features of the Vespera Pro compared to the Vespera II include larger internal storage, a longer life battery, a complete range of Vaonis accessories and even an anti-theft system. What advantages does do the Vespera Smart Telescopes have over lower cost options? The main advantage is the quality of the images produced by both Vespera models is significantly higher than those produced by DWARF or Seestar S50.  The Vespera is larger and heavier, however it's still extremely portable and easy to set up, especially in the dark. The Vaonis  app, Singularity, will make take astro photos much easier even for complete beginners while having advanced features for those with more experience. Finally, the Vespera is a  elegant device and we have more than a few users even have them as part of their home decor. Celestron joins the party. The Origin Intelligent Home Observatory None of the current suppliers of Smart Telescopes have any real history of making telescopes of any kind - with the exception of Celestron. Based in California, Celestron have been the world's largest supplier of telescopes and associated gear for decades.  They also have a long history of introducing computerised mounts and telescopes for amatuer astronomers. It's no surprise their first Smart Telescope, the Celestron Origin, immediately become the most powerful and fully featured Smart Telescope on its release in January 2024 at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. Unlike all other current Smart Telescopes,  the Celestron Origin is somewhat modular and based around a number of technologies that Celestron has been perfecting in other models for some years.  For example, the telescope itself is a style of reflector called a  RASA.  This has an extremely fast focal ratio of f/2.2 that provides an extremely wide field of view and can capture deep-sky details in a much shorter time compared to other devices. The aperture of the Celestron Origin at 150mm (6") is much larger than other other Smart Telescope, meaning it has the ability to image fainter targets and product finer details on brighter astro objects.  Unlike other Smart Telescopes, which are limited to upgrades only via software, some of the Celestron Origin's hardware can be improved via hardware updates and add-ons. Celestron have stated that camera upgrades are on roadmap as well as wedges and autoguiders for more accurate and longer exposures. Apart from being the most expensive Smart Telescope available today, the Celestron Origin is larger and set up and transport is similar to traditional astrophotography setup. Check out the Celestron Origin here. Is there anything you can't photograph well with Smart Telescopes? Yes. They all have relatively short focal lengths. This makes them well suited to deep-space astro objects such as star clusters, nebulae and even galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. Solar System planets take up a small amount of space in the sky and typically need a long focal length telescope to view or capture them. You can take images of Jupiter and Saturn through Smart Telescopes but the results won't be as impressive as deep-sky images obtained with them. Are Smart Telescopes replacing more traditional astrophotography platforms? The short answer is no, however there's a little bit more to it. We don't know of any of our customer who are seriously into astrophotography who now use a Smart Telescope instead of their existing astro imaging rig because they produce better astro photos.  Smart Telescope photos are not as good as the very best obtained conventional telescopes, astronomy cameras and mounts along with a decent amount of experience. In fact, I think it's going to be a long time before that happens. Our experience with Smart Telescopes of different types over the last few years is that while a large proportion are ending up in the hands of newbies just starting out in astronomy, a significant chunk are being purchased by experienced astronomer who want an astro system that can be produce decent images with little hassle,  are easy to set up and even fun to use. Can the images produced by Smart Telescopes be further improved? Yes. The data collected by all Smart Telescopes is processed in software to reveal as much detail as possible. Their apps can produce some quite amazing result and all models now allow you to download the "raw" data for processing on your device or even using an external program such as Siril or PixInsight. Finally - are there new models due soon? Should I buy a Smart Telescope now or wait? Of course there's new models and features on the horizon. Smart Telescopes have been a success for telescope makes but they need to keep up. They're facing new products from existing suppliers and possibly even emerging players. Like other "hot" areas of tech, their engineers and designers hard at work on the next generation of their products. If you say "I'll wait for whatever is coming next" you might put off for quite a long time the start of your astro journey. Sure, there's new gear that will be launched in the future, but the current generation of Smart Telescopes are the easiest and most effective way that have ever existed to get seriously into astronomy and start discovering the Universe. For ever the most seasoned astronomers, that's a truly wonderful thing to have happening around them. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 18th September 2024

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.