Sky & Telescope - January 2025 - 68

S&T Test Report
These 3-minute exposures of the globular cluster M13 (left) and the Dumbbell Nebula, M27 (right), are the author's first two images made with the
Origin. Within 15 minutes of powering up the scope for the first time ever, the pair had been captured, automatically processed, and saved on his
iPhone. Unless otherwise stated, all celestial images with this review are taken directly from the Origin gallery on the phone, with only the brightness
and contrast tweaked using the phone's built-in photo-editing tools.
objects, I was rewarded with an impressive
set of images, including nebulae.
I was so impressed that I dropped my
plans to take the scope to a dark-sky site
(well, lousy weather played a role, too)
to showcase the RASA's ability. Getting
such good results under my suburban
skies is, in my opinion, an even better
demonstration of the scope's capability.
While I suspect most people are
interested in the Origin for its imaging
potential, because the scope generates
such good on-screen images quickly, I
found it fun to use for observing. And it
certainly would be a fascinating instrument
for public-outreach situations.
Getting Even More
For people who want to take their
astrophotography beyond the app's
automatic, AI-powered image processing
described above, there are several
ways to do this. One of the easiest is to
tinker with the app's settings for the AI
processing rather than using the default
settings. Another is to use the post-processing,
image-tweaking controls in the
app or that are typically available with
the device you're running the app on.
For example, the images accompanying
this article had their brightness and
contrast adjusted with the photo-editing
tools built into my iPhone. Going
further, you can download the stacked
TIFF files from the scope's internal
memory and process them with any of
the myriads of photo-editing computer
programs available today.
Lastly, you can set the Origin to save
every individual exposure used by its
stacking process as a separate FITS file
(along with factory pre-loaded dark,
bias, and flat-field calibration files). This
is the standard for advanced astronomical
image-processing programs. Just be
mindful that these 12.2-megabyte FITS
files quickly mount up. An hour-long
exposure made with the default 10-second
subexposures produces 360 FITS
files totaling well over 4 gigabytes of
data. You can increase the subexposure
durations to 15 or 30 seconds to reduce
the number of files, but longer exposures
do not work well in all parts of
the sky due to the inherent image rotation
that occurs with an altazimuthmounted
telescope. At the moment, the
Origin doesn't work in equatorial mode,
but there are rumors that this may be
an option in the future.
Software
If reviewing the Origin were just about
the hardware, it would be a slam-dunk
process. I was truly impressed with the
Origin's mechanics and optics. Everything
is well designed and well manufactured.
I doubt that even a nitpicker could
find something to complain about.
But the Origin " experience " is based
Lagoon Nebula,
15-minute exposure
68 JANUARY 2025 * SKY & TELESCOPE
on more than hardware. Indeed, of the
hours I spent with the telescope during
my two months of testing, all but a
few were devoted to using the app. And
reviewing software for a brand-new
product can be a bit of a fool's errand,

Sky & Telescope - January 2025

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky & Telescope - January 2025