A New Way to Explore the Universe

This is the Lagoon Nebula; a snapshot of stars caught in the act of being born. It is about 5000 light years distant to Earth.  

Can you imagine taking this photo yourself, within a day of receiving your shiny new telescope?  

Or, consider this shot of the stunningly majestic Andromeda Galaxy, one of our closest neighbouring galaxies, only about 2.5 million light years away, made up of roughly a trillion stars.

Maybe snap this on the same night?

You won’t ever see anything like this through an optical telescope.  In fact, it takes serious practice to see anything much at all, even with large telescopes worth many thousands of dollars.  

It takes time and patience to train your eye to the tiny amounts of light, all while chasing a constantly moving target.  And you certainly won’t see colours: the light from these deep space objects is much too faint.  

Cheap amateur telescopes are limited further by their cheaper optics and limited apertures, delivering a thoroughly frustrating experience more often than not.

Telescopes have presented a conundrum for me ever since I first opened our Brain Spice doors.  Our night sky is full of extraordinary objects and vistas, begging to be explored.  The whole premise of Brain Spice is to encourage such exploration.  But telescopes are just tricky things to use.

Over the years, I’ve sold many cheap telescopes – very capable cheap telescopes - but I wonder how many recipients did their best, and then gave up and lost interest after seeing little more than the moon.

I speak from experience.  I was one of those kids.

Astrophotography has become more accessible over the years, but even a basic setup was daunting.  It is not just a matter of attaching a camera to a telescope.  To generate rich, colourful images like the ones above, you need to accumulate long exposures over hours of time.  This means automated tracking, which means a telescope with motorised mounting, sophisticated software, and a steep learning curve.

I’m telling you all of this, because I really want to convey my excitement about the DWARF Mini and the recent advent of “smart telescopes”.  Because, for the first time in human history, deep space exploration has just become readily accessible for everyone.  We can all be space-time travellers!

The DWARF Mini is a precision astro camera, auto-tracking mount, and intelligent control system, all in a device about the size of your hand.

Set it up in your backyard on a clear evening.  Use an app on your phone to dial up a galaxy, nebula, star field, cluster, planet, moon, solar eclipse - pretty much anything skyward – and just hit go.

The DWARF Mini finds the item of interest, frames it, tracks it, takes as many photos as you want, and stacks them for you to generate a beautiful crisp, final image.  And you can watch all of this happen on your phone in real time – or go to bed, and see the results in the morning!

This is phenomenal.

By the way, both of the images above were actually taken with a DWARF Mini.

Ever since a chap called Galileo pointed a strange tubelike thing at the night sky, and noticed that one of the planets had “ears” – the same day he started to drink heavily, I suspect – the night sky has only become increasingly bizarre and fascinating.

Children today have already seen all of those stunning Hubble and James Webb images, but until now, they could only dream of generating similarly beautiful images themselves.

Adults with any interest in astrophotography can quite suddenly now enter and pursue the hobby with ease.  With all of the DWARF Mini's usability, there is still plenty of options to explore and experiment with. You can even become part of a larger cooperative community worldwide, pointing multiple DWARF Mini’s at various targets for even bigger and more astonishing results.  

More sophisticated equipment hasn’t suddenly become obsolete – but that isn’t the point.   The DWARF Mini has revolutionised accessibility, while still delivering results that are seriously impressive.  And I'm not pretending that the price tag isn't still a barrier, but you could easily spend the same amount on a basic amateur telescope with a hundred times less capability.

For us, accessibility is what it’s all about.  I’m chuffed to be one of the first Australian stores to offer the DWARF Mini.  A window to another wonder-filled vista has just been flung open for us humble humans.  

I can't sum this moment up any better than the late Stephen Hawking; I think he would have approved of Brain Spice and our mission.  And, I suspect, the DWARF Mini!

"Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious." - Stephen Hawking