The Unistellar Odyssey smart telescope made me wonder what stargazing means

It’s been 300 years since Galileo and Isaac Newton began tinkering with lenses and parabolic mirrors to better see the sky. But if you look at many of today’s best amateur telescopes, you might think they haven’t progressed much since then.

While the components have certainly improved, the basic combination of mirrors and lenses is more or less the same. Even the most advanced “smart” frames that hold them rely on technology that hasn’t advanced in 30 years.

Compared to the radical reinvention that even the humble telephone has received, it’s sad that telescope technology has largely been left behind. But that is finally changing. Companies like Unistellar and Vaonis are pioneering a new generation of oscilloscopes that throw classic astronomy standards and concepts out the window in favor of seamless setup and remarkable image quality.

But is it really stargazing if you look at your smartphone instead of at the stars? This is what I tried to discover using two generations of “smart” telescopes, one old and one new, brought together during the recent solar eclipse.

Old versus new

In the “old” corner is my six-inch GSO, a Newtonian reflector with some improvements. This is a basic, high-end scope for amateur astronomers, but a solid foundation for learning. Plus, the real money is in the frame and eyepieces. For eyepieces, I tested with a Baader Hyperion Zoom Mark IV and a Hyperion 5mm.

However, the bulk of the cost of this setup is in the mount, a Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro. This is one of the most advanced “smart” telescopes in the classical style, an equatorial mount that, when properly aligned (more on that in a moment), can find celestial objects and track them across the sky using a device called SynScan 6. .

The SynScan and Sky-Watcher use technology widely referred to as “GoTo”, a general term for a mount capable of finding celestial objects in the sky. These oscilloscopes first appeared in the late 1980s and have seen little progress since.

To find these celestial objects, you will generally need to know their Messier (M) or New General Catalog (NGC) numbers, and put them into a handheld controller that offers all the finesse of a Speak & Spell. (SynScan makes a smartphone app, but it replicates the same user experience, earning it two stars on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.)

The total cost of an installation like this? About $2,500.

It’s a significant investment, but it’s very affordable compared to the $3,999 Unistellar Odyssey Pro. For that, you get a disconcertingly large telescope, a very rudimentary-looking tripod mount, and not much else.

But if cost is an issue (as it certainly is for me), you’ll probably want to buy the $2,499 Unistellar Odyssey instead. Ditching the Pro designation saves you $1,500 and only costs you one feature: an eyepiece on the side, which you probably don’t want anyway.

How to use a telescope without an eyepiece? This is where everything starts to get complicated.