This post is going to be a bit different than the others on this blog but it does relate to people getting stuff wrong :-)
A while ago I was told about a new amateur astronomical instrument that was essentially an automatic camera that had an eyepiece built in so you could see the image in a similar way to using a telescope but have the advantages of modern solid-state sensors and image processing. As a long time amateur astronomer I have long wondered why it felt so different to look through an eyepiece and see a faint gray object as opposed to seeing an image on a page or a screen of the same thing with far more detail and often in color. There is, at least to me, a certain feeling that made looking at the object more emotionally satisfying than looking at an image. I didn't know if it was the immediacy of the eyepiece, the knowledge that it was my eye that was absorbing the light, or something else but the difference was very real and quite significant.
So what would it be like to view an object through an eyepiece but be looking not at the telescopically gathered light but at an image that was formed by that light. I had a guess that it would feel like looking at a screen. I jumped at the chance to find out and I was wrong. It felt like looking through a scope. Perhaps it was the fact that my eye was focussed for infinity(or as close as my near-sighted vision allows). The first object I saw was one that I have seen many times in telescope, M 57 or the Ring Nebula. In a telescope it is a small, faint, colorless ghostly smoke ring. In the eVscope it was bright, obvious, and colorful. An amazing sight.
I was so impressed that I did a short promotional video for the Kickstarter campaign which I also backed. This had a side effect that I didn't anticipate. One of the "features" of our modern world are people that are often called YouTubers and a some of them spend a significant fraction of their time doing takedowns of things and ideas that they determine are worthy of such treatment. One of these people did an "EVSCOPE BUSTED" video that included a piece of my promotional video. Some friends of mine let me know about it so I watched.
The video is a mix of lots of elements. Much of what was "busted" was a strawman, some of which might just be misunderstanding. But one particular aspect is the reason for this post. The YouTuber apparently had the same initial reaction I did to the idea of the eVscope and, like me, assumed that it wouldn't "feel" like looking through scope. Several times in the video it was clearly and confidently stated that this would not be like looking through a scope. The kicker is that I'm quite certain that this position was reached without ever trying one. Without ever seeing one. There were also a large number of other assertions made without actually trying the device which are sometimes spectacularly wrong.
