The very first Unistellar eVscope is a little dated, and it's been replaced by the Unistellar eVscope 2 at the top of this guide. As an introduction to the world of smart telescoping the Vespera is hard to beat. See our full Vaonis Vespera review (opens in new tab). It doesn’t need focusing nor collimation. It gets wonderful images from cities – even without the light pollution filter – and it’s possible to export them as raw TIFF and FITS files for post-processing (though only via WiFi and a browser). The Vespera is also relatively low resolution, with its two megapixel images among the softest of any smart telescope and it can’t be used for planets or the moon. Its battery lasts just four hours, which is a shame, but can be topped-up using any portable smartphone battery. The first thing that needs upgrading is its tripod, which is a tiny tabletop affair, though it can be mounted on any photographic tripod. It’s possible to add an excellent backpack, a light pollution filter, a dual-band filter (for better capturing faint nebulae), a solar filter, and even a hygrometer sensor for humidity data. There’s no eyepiece, but everything else is an optional add-on. The Vaonis Vespera is the most basic smart telescope around. Since it’s a reflector telescope it will occasionally need collimating (opens in new tab). Instead it comes with a Bahtinov mask built into its lens cap that helps get stars really sharp, though it’s a manual process. Its lack of an eyepiece makes sense from a cost-saving perspective – and it adds two hours of battery life – but it does make it more difficult to focus the eQuinox. The eQuinox has slightly less resolving power than the eVscope 2 (which makes it more difficult to split close double stars), a tighter field of view, less detailed images (its natively 1.2 megapixel images are up-rezzed to 4.8 megapixels using software interpolation) and no electronic eyepiece. That’s identical to the eVscope and eVscope 2, but eQuinox is different. It allows up to 10 smartphones and tablets to connect to its own WiFi network to see and download its images. So it’s super-easy to use. Read our full Vaonis Stellina review (opens in new tab).Īt its core it’s a 4.5-inch reflector telescope fitted with a Sony IMX224 CMOS image sensor to power its Enhanced Vision (EV) views of galaxies, nebulae, open clusters and globular clusters. Unlike Unistellar’s products this telescope has autofocus and, as a refractor telescope, doesn’t need collimation. It’s also possible to export raw TIFF and FITS image files for post-processing to a computer just by attaching a USB-C cable. Up to 20 smartphones or tablets with the Singularity app can hook-up to its WiFI and watch its incredible images come down. Where Stellina does beat all other smart telescopes is with its connectivity. A backpack is also available as an add-on.Īt 6.4 megapixels its detail isn’t quite up there with the Unistellar eVscope 2, but it’s very close. Another slightly odd exclusion is a built-in battery, with the Stellina instead depending on an external 10,000 mAh power bank (opens in new tab) that needs to be cabled-up. To get some height, a full-size photographic tripod (opens in new tab) is required. It ships with a small Gitzo tripod that’s really only good enough for wide-open spaces or tabletops. The smart telescope that started it all remains one of the best, but there are caveats. Let's look at the best smart telescopes you can get right now. Far pricier than optical telescopes of similar quality, they nevertheless offer unrivaled convenience and many unique features. What these first-generation smart telescopes have in common are their astronomical prices. However, what makes the best smart telescopes so addictive is that they also take incredible images of all kinds of objects in the night sky. They use AI to align themselves with the night sky, providing apps that make it easy to ‘go to’ any object you want at the touch of a button. Not to be confused with the best computerized telescopes (opens in new tab), smart telescopes are motorized and come equipped with both artificial intelligence (AI) and camera sensors. They also use cutting-edge astrophotography techniques, to locate faint objects in the night sky and then take long exposure images of them, merging one on top of the other to remove noise, battle the problem of light pollution and improve the image quality. Unlike some of the best telescopes for astrophotography (opens in new tab), smart telescopes are easy for beginners to use.
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