Augmented Astronomical Telescope
Andrei Linţu, Marcus A. Magnor · Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics · 2005
Anyone who gazed through the eyepiece of an astronomical telescope knows that except for the Moon and the planets, extra-solar astronomical objects are hard to observe. This is mainly due to their low surface brightness, but also depends on the seeing, sky brightness and telescope aperture. We propose a system which projects images of astronomical objects (with focus on nebulae and galaxies), animations or additional information directly into the eyepiece view of an astronomical telescope. As the telescope orientation is tracked continuously, the projected image is adapted in real-time to the object which is currently visible through the eyepiece. This way, visitors to public observatories have the possibility to experience the richness of deep sky objects while directly gazing at them through a telescope.