After a couple hours of sleep, Rachel Knight woke to an alarm set for 2 a.m. Two alarms, actually. Her phone and Amazon Echo clamored in tandem to make sure she didn’t sleep through the night.

It was her turn to head out to the backyard and monitor the telescope.

The Unistellar eVscope was pointed at the relatively clear sky over suburbs north of Los Angeles. It was mid-August, five months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Knight and her husband were tracking an asteroid, 787 Moskva, which orbits the sun between our neighbor Mars and its distant neighbor Jupiter.

With a traditional telescope, they would have needed to look at star maps to calculate the position of the asteroid depending on the time of day and their location, and then adjust as the Earth rotated and the object moved.

The Unistellar eVscopeis much more user-friendly. With a press of a button in the companion app, users can pinpoint stars, galaxies, and other objects in deep space.

The “eV” part of its name stands for “Enhanced Vision.” Once it’s on a target, the scope takes continuous images and stacks them. That accumulated light makes objects brighter and more detailed in a matter of seconds, providing much more vivid results than a standard telescope of the same size.

As it soaked up the sunlight bouncing off the asteroid, Knight's scope recorded what it saw: a little bright blob arcing across the night sky.

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That data can be passed to scientists, like Unistellar’s partners at the renowned SETI Institute. Since 1984, SETI has been searching for life outside of Earth, and working with NASA to find planets orbiting other stars, called exoplanets.

The $3,000 eVscope sold out due to high demand, although the more recently released eVscope eQuinoxis available with a slightly better battery minus the eyepiece for the same price. No other telescope can match the eVscope's combination of deep-space image processing, GoTo software, portability, internet connectivity, simple app, and connection to the citizen science community.

“My husband was an early backer of a Kickstarter [campaign] for the Unistellar telescope — he's always been much more into the stars and space and everything,” Knight said. “We got it in January of last year, and then we locked down about two months later. That's when I took it and I made it mine.”

Amid the stress, uncertainty, loneliness, and boredom of lockdown, people latched onto hobbies both old and new. Some baked bread, some started running, and some, like Knight, looked up to the night sky. And she wasn't alone.

Unistellar's sleek, compact telescopes produce outstanding images for their size.Credit: unistellar

Kevin Voeller, a high school earth and space science teacher in Huntington Beach, Calif., was another early backer of the eVscope. With a lifelong interest in astronomy, he has picked up a few telescopes over the years.

“But we're in the middle of one of the most light-polluted areas in the world, being in the suburbs of the Los Angeles Basin,” Voeller said “So it made it difficult to see any kind of deep-space energy or deep-space objects.”

The eVscope's image processing, however, made observations from Voeller's light-polluted neighborhood look impressive. And its app and tracking features were helpful, too.

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“One of the problems I would have being in a suburban neighborhood is, you set up the scope, and then the thing you want to see happens to be behind a streetlight," Voeller said. "And now you've got to pick it up and move it and you know, recalibrate the whole thing. The eVscope, you pick it up, put it down in a new spot, hit one button, it recalibrates itself, and now you're off and running again.”

In Vienna, Austria, another eVscope-using citizen astronomer, Mario Billiani, has been more or less confined to his home office since March 2020.

“I have a rooftop terrace where I can put the scope outside and get into bed and just let the telescope do the work, sometimes change the settings or something,” he said. “Then I don't have to freeze my ass off anywhere.”

After netting more than $2 million on Kickstarter for the eVscope, Unistellar began shipping the scopes in late 2019, just a few months before many countries entered lockdown. Scopes have continued to trickle out to backers throughout 2020, with Voeller’s arriving in February and Billiani’s following in September.

"It makes up for the lack of sleep."

It came at the perfect time for those who were looking for something that both satisfied their curiosity and was completely safe.

“I was looking for an activity that would get me out of the house, frankly, because I'm someone that quarantines very heavily,” Knight said. “And then there's that socialization component where you have that online community of people that you're learning from and that you're sharing with that kind of helped with the loneliness I think a little bit too.”

Connections through the sky

With its eVscope, Unistellar has created a global mesh of citizen astronomers who, if they’re down to participate, can work collectively to observe targets from different angles, gathering data for scientists to help unravel the mysteries of space. Many users chat in an active Slack group, connecting people with similar interests all over the world and keeping everyone up to date on what’s going on outside the bounds of Earth.

But even taking Slack out of the equation, connections are being made through the observations. Even if they don’t know who else is viewing an object, people are working together to corroborate and confirm findings. Sometimes it’s about pinning down trajectories or shapes of asteroids, sometimes it’s about discovering exoplanets orbiting distant stars.

For many observations, people don’t find out immediately if what they captured was actually helpful.

“Then you get an email a few months later, and oh, hey, you actually caught something, you are one of three people in the entire history of the world to ever capture this,” said Knight. “It makes up for the lack of sleep.”

Two observations that Knight made, the luminous Neowise comet that lit up the sky last summer and an asteroid dubbed 1999 AP10, were also peeped by fellow eVscope user Bruno Guillet. Guillet, an associate professor in applied physics at the University of Caen Normandie, made his observations from his backyard in Caen, France, more than 5,000 miles away.

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“It's really interesting to know that someone will observe the same object,” Guillet said.

He explained that with large distances between observers, they can view objects at different points in their paths, giving scientists more data than if they just used a single telescope.

Voeller said the eVscope has allowed him to easily share his observations with friends, who can connect to the scope on their own phones from a safe distance to comply with social distancing guidelines. It also makes connecting with students easier when he can present actual data or objects that he has observed, like the Trojan asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit that NASA’s Lucy missionwill visit.

“One of the things that I really try to provide for my students is real life science, not made up numbers to prove a point,” he said. “I could share with my students next year: 'Hey, that rocket that's launching on Oct. 16, that thing is going to an asteroid that I helped collect a little tiny bit of data, and in my own little way I contributed to that mission, and that mission will contribute to an understanding of where the solar system formed.”

While the eVscope is a powerful tool, sometimes the stars don’t quite align, so to speak.

Billiani said he wanted to get a glimpse of the asteroid Apophis, which would be passing in front of a star — an event called an occultation — over central Europe on a partially cloudy March 11 night. He drove an hour and a half out to the mountains of southern Austria where the occultation would only be visible in a 100-meter-wide band.

Earlier, the sky had been clearing up. But with half an hour to go, and the scope set up in a clearing in the woods, the clouds returned, obscuring what would have been the perfect view. The sky remained overcast until 15 minutes after the occultation passed.

“I'd do it again in an instant, as I would have been one of only a few people worldwide who witnessed an occultation by Apophis, and the only one in Europe who could have seen and recorded it on that day,” he said. “Karma wasn't on my side this time but I'm really looking forward to my next challenge!”

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