Verdict
Unistellar’s Odyssey Pro is a very interesting device for anyone who’d like to see more of the objects in the night sky. It’s superior to picking up a traditional scope and attaching a camera to it in terms of usability, but the main drawback is that, at the time of writing, it costs a lot of money.
You’ll get a lot out of the Odyssey Pro as long as you’re prepared to stay up late, but by sinking the same amount of money into a larger reflector and a dedicated camera setup, you’ll be able to learn more about image capture and processing and potentially produce better results.
Pros
- Convenient and easy to use
- Decent on-screen results
- Smaller and lighter than previous models
Cons
- Expensive
- Painted all black
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Reflecting telescopeLight is bounced between mirrors to enlarge the view, with a camera in place of an optical eyepiece. Software then stacks images to improve light sensitivity. -
App controlledEverything is done through the Unistellar app, which connects to the scope via Wi-Fi. You search the catalogue for nebulae and galaxies, and the scope shows them to you.
Introduction
The night is dark and full of wonders, but it helps if you’ve got something to help make them more visible. That’s where telescopes come in, and Unistellar has a range of interesting motorised, app-controlled models that take a lot of the hard work out of stargazing.
The Odyssey Pro is smaller and lighter than the EvScope 2 and eQuinox 2, but sits closer to the more expensive EvScope in terms of price. It beats those instruments in one important way – this second-gen robot scope now has autofocus, so there’s no more fiddling around with a wheel in the dark.
Beyond that simple improvement, Unistellar’s extremely convenient reinterpretation of astrophotography continues to produce excellent results.
With its ability to track an object for as long as it takes to obtain a clear image of it the galaxies and nebulae that aren’t visible to the naked eye, you can find things you never knew were lurking in the darkness between the stars, and the feeling as the spiral arms of a galaxy emerge from the background is one of real discovery.
Design and Features
- 320mm focal length, 85mm mirror, f/3.9
- Completely self-contained
- Easy to trip over
Unistellar’s automated telescopes consist of a Newtonian tube with a digital sensor and Wi-Fi hotspot attached, all wrapped in a smooth plastic coating that fits neatly into the top of the supplied tripod. It’s a neat system, but one that was slightly marred by previous scopes being heavy, tricky to transport and prone to swaying in the wind. The Odyssey Pro fixes many of these faults simply by being smaller and lighter, though in the world of telescopes bigger is often better.
The Odyssey Pro is also black all over, which is suboptimal for something you’ll be using in the dark. It’s possible to pick out thanks to the glowing LED light, the colour of which can give you a clue as to what the scope is doing, but it’s also possible to stumble over a tripod leg if you’re not paying sufficient attention – such as if you’re glued to your phone screen.
The silver finish of the EvScope and eQuinox scopes gives you more of a chance of seeing them in the night, so it’s perhaps best to set the Odyssey up and then sit down or go indoors rather than roam around where there’s the potential to cause an accident.
Or you could hang a red light from it. During my use of the Odyssey Pro, some flying denizen of the night pooped on it, while a wandering hedgehog was unperturbed by its presence, snuffling straight under the tripod legs, so it’s not just humans who might have trouble seeing it.
Luckily, you can operate the Odyssey from a distance thanks to its Wi-Fi hotspot. Connect your phone to this (make sure you set it to remain connected, rather than switching back to your home Wi-Fi when it can’t find an internet connection) and you can go through setup, calibration and operation from inside where it’s warm, as long as you’re not too far away or have too many walls in between.
It’s not the most powerful hotspot, so you might need to set the scope up close to your window if you intend operating it from inside, but the important thing is that you don’t have to stand out in the cold.
Setup is a case of making sure the scope is level, using the bubble built into the tripod, and waiting for the Sun to go down. The automated calibration process requires stars to be visible, and the darker the sky the better. Once it can see some twinkly points of light, however, it works out where it is (taking GPS data from the connected device) and which way it’s pointing, and it can use this to rotate and angle itself to view anything you like, as long as there aren’t buildings, trees or a planet in the way.
The object catalogue is contained in the app, and based on your location (running it on a tablet gives you the benefit of a bigger screen, but you may need to input your latitude and longitude if it doesn’t have GPS) tells you what you should be able to see that night.
It can’t take into account the effect of overhanging trees or obstructive buildings, however, so you’ll need to use the object’s direction and height information to work out whether you can actually see it from your viewing spot. If you can, you can instruct the scope to slew to it, which it does quickly, quietly and accurately.
The catalogue can focus on objects such as the Orion Nebula, Bode’s Galaxy, and the Hercules Globular Cluster but omits comets, such as Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks, which was lost in the glare of sunset but still technically visible.
Ease of use is high up the list of the Odyssey Pro’s achievements, but if you want to treat it more like a traditional telescope you can use the eyepiece, which is more like a small screen that displays the camera feed. It’s fine, but viewing on a phone or tablet screen is a more convenient way to see things.
Image Quality
- 6.4MP files
- Automatic tracking and stacking
- Uncompressed data available
Get the telescope locked onto an object and you can tap a button in the app to engage dynamic signal amplification, or Enhanced Vision.
This begins tracking the target, recording many images and stacking them to produce a better image, keeping the background black but bringing out the faint glow from ionised gases or billions of stars many light-years away.
Many deep-sky objects are dim as well as appearing small, thanks to space being big, and the more of their light you can capture the better the image you can get. With its focal ratio of f/3.9, the Odyssey Pro lets in more light than many with a similar focal length, but the best images are obtained by leaving it to track and stack for as long as possible.
Something large and bright such as the Moon requires only a few seconds of tracking to create a sharp image from which you can easily pick out the craters, marae and lines of ejecta. The 6.4MP images can be downloaded straight to your phone’s camera roll with the tap of a single button, or you can access the scope’s 64GB of on-board storage via Wi-Fi to obtain them as PNG, TIFF or FITS files if you intend processing them yourself later. Adding a bit of extra contrast in your phone’s editing app is often all that’s needed to bring out some extra detail, however.
When photographing more distant objects, such as galaxies, be prepared to leave the telescope working for an hour or more. It’s important that the scope isn’t interrupted during this time, and that can be by the viewing device locking or disconnecting from the Wi-Fi. These actions, along with the wind making it wobble or the object passing behind an obstruction, can lead to the dreaded “Enhanced vision disrupted” message. There’s a setting to ensure the image file being constructed is immediately dumped to storage when this happens, and it’s well worth turning on.
The images produced by the Odyssey Pro are sharp and while small have enough resolution to zoom into on a phone or tablet screen, with the spiral arms of Bode’s Galaxy (M81, 12 million light-years away) visible after half an hour of exposure and improving after that.
Stars of the M3 globular cluster (at a distance of 34,000 light-years) although merged into one at the core, could be picked out with just 10 minutes of stacking despite light pollution from a nearby three-quarter Moon.
The Odyssey Pro’s software deals with unwanted sky glow, whether from nearby cities or our natural satellite, very well, keeping the sky black enough to contrast with the brighter objects you’re hoping to find. Battery life, at up to five hours, means you can observe well into the night, and you can attach a power pack (or a charger on an extension cable if you don’t mind the additional trip hazard) to the USB-C port in order to extend this.
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Should you buy it?
You want a simple way to take photos of the night sky
As a small and light automated telescope for observing night sky objects and sharing your pictures, the Odyssey Pro excels at making astrophotography more accessible.
You want higher-resolution photos or a cheaper option
It’s awfully expensive, while the 6.4MP files are outclassed by many dedicated astro cameras, as well as by strapping a DSLR or your phone to a telescope eyepiece.
Final Thoughts
Astrophotography is a hobby that means staying up late at night and accumulating expensive pieces of equipment. In many ways it’s perfect.
But it also demands that you sink large amounts of time into acquiring and processing images. Unistellar’s scopes simplify this part of the process, producing files that can be on Instagram within minutes of being taken.
Its smaller size and weight make it an improvement over the company’s larger scopes like the EvScope 2 and eQuinox 2. The constantly updated app and broad catalogue mean it’s easier than ever to home in on a deep-sky object and see it, before saving a picture to your phone to show your friends.
However, you need to be prepared to pay for the convenience.
FAQs
A smartphone app, connected via Wi-Fi, directs the telescope where to point.
