I recently got loaned a Unistellar Odyssey Pro digital telescope, this is a compact telescope for amateur astronomers which uses on board image accumulation to reveal deep sky objects like Nebula in ways a traditional purely optical telescope cannot. I had a few hours to play with this, mostly limited by the absolutely terrible weather that rolled into the area, no doubt a result of ‘New Telescope Curse’, and I’m extraordinarily impressed with the capabilities, and intrigued by the possibilities of working on real astronomical research.
Unistellar loaned me this telescope for this video, and If you’re really interested in one of these I have a helpful link to their store (which gets me commission in return).
And for the next week or the Black Friday sale is running, giving everyone a 20% discount!
AND…. for channel viewers there’s a special code that’ll get you the Solar Filter for the Odyssey series for free, the filter is essential if you are interested in viewing sunspots or with the telescope.
* add an Odyssey/Odyssey Pro and the ‘Smart Solar Filter’ to the shopping cart and use the code ‘scott1124’ during the checkout to get the filter for free.
So – here’s the link for those of you in a buying mood: https://tidd.ly/4i7ZlZB
The Black Friday Sale runs until December 2nd, after that the discount is gone and the bonus code won’t work.
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source
Unistellar Store Link: https://tidd.ly/4i7ZlZB
Unistellar loaned me this telescope for this video, and If you're really interested in one of these I have a helpful link to their store (which gets me commission in return).
And for the next week or the Black Friday sale is running, giving everyone a 20% discount!
AND…. for channel viewers there's a special code that'll get you the Solar Filter for the Odyssey series for free, the filter is essential if you are interested in viewing sunspots or with the telescope.
* add an Odyssey/Odyssey Pro and the 'Smart Solar Filter' to the shopping cart and use the code 'scott1124' during the checkout to get the filter for free.
So – here's the link for those of you in a buying mood:
* https://tidd.ly/4i7ZlZB **
The Black Friday Sale runs until December 2nd, after that the discount is gone and the bonus code won't work.
there is an amazing experience to do astrophotography. To make mistakes when aligning, to improve and to buy new scopes. It cannot be replicated with a point and shoot thing.
I worry this is similar to the Samsung galaxy with the moon filter. Is it not just sourcing other images of what you’re looking at to then enhance your image?? How do we know it’s actually processing a real image as opposed to supplementing your image with nasa images
Nice $4300 in Canada!
the armature broke on my scope years ago.
You sir, are a fantastic salesman
Seeing Orbital perform Brown must have been amazing; that and Carl Cox FACT opened my eyes to that imagination can be realised. That there is more to this word that what the standard information gatekeepers have us believe and we can escape their narratives and no longer be stuck where time becomes a loop, where time becomes a loop, where time becomes a loop.
Can concur, haven't seen any 80cm telescopes on sale at walmart!
11:13 "…and I said go to Orion, and it hopped up started searching for my kid"
My days of astrophotography were using 35mm film and long exposures guiding manually with an off axis reticle eyepiece. Some of my exposures were an hour long.
to be fair, the true astrophotography stuff has cheaper options availabile now that weren't available back then. my SW SA-GTI was $700 (plus a $400 135mm lens and $600 camera), it's portable, and it's controlled with my phone. and then I get the fun of processing the data on my own and it's 24mp instead of just 4. this is a cool toy, but not really for someone who actually wants to get into astrophotography
one thing this does do is it keeps you from buying more gear at least (i spent another $700 on a planetary setup that's light enough for my mount)
Absolutely, bitterly cold, says the (now)Californian. Was it below 50F?
Scott if you like telescopes get in touch with me and you can come do astronomy on the 100 inch Hooker telescope at Mt Wilson. We are currently working on an advanced science camera package to do observations with the old telescope. We just got done doing engineering on the system at Mt Wilson and our first science run will be in June of 2025.
Hats off to Hartnoll bros. of Orbital for making Scott «not entirely sober» by a strategically written old albums from 90s🤪
You could pass as a 3rd Orbital brother by the way. I think you need to get a dual headlamp for your next video and do a live synth set for us.
0:37 “The photos on those things are never as good as what you can see through the eye piece” 1:06 “80cm refractor” FFS you had one job Scott… 😐
If these can be hooked in to a network of owners, they could be left running in the backyards of people world wide, and combine images from many units in to a massive virtual telescope. Cloudy where you are, share the images off of scopes where it's clear. Spot something moving, send out a group request to slew scopes on to the same object for hyper accurate distance and direction calculation. Volunteer scope time to deep-feild exposures.
I don't look at smart scopes as an either/or product. They are just another tool to help people enjoy the night sky or in fact the day time sky as well as most have solar filters. I don't have one by the way, not because I have anything against them but because over the years I have built up rigs that can do the same thing, but admittedly I do have to polar align them, but as the mini pcs I use for control have PA software it takes no more than a minute or two to do that. I still like using binoculars for star gazing and even the good old mark 1 eyeball. Astronomy, like any other hobby should be fun, the tools we use to that end are entirely up to personal choice. We're so lucky these days to have such a wide range of gear to choose from.
Whatever we choose, they are all reduced to ornaments by cloudy weather!
Great review. Any chance you'll show us what it can do shooting the sun?
Requires a smart phone to operate? Instant no from me.
Sorry, but I haven't seen a single result or original material from the Unistellar that would justify the price of over 3000. It was all kind of bad, washed out and the star depiction was just terrible. I wanted to buy a Vaonis myself and thank God I ended up with the Seestar and have now bought the DwarfIII, which has EQ mode.
Plot twist: this scope is good enough only to identify an object and download a high-res photo of this object from the internet to show it to the user.
I wonder how long it will be till you will be able to buy time or request images from an orbital telescope as a normal person.
I looked at these sort of telescopes a few years ago. The thing is I want to have the telescope in the garden and control & view on my big 4K screen in my nice warm house. I cannot understand why there is still no PC software. It seems I would still be forced to do it on a mobile phone app. Crazy. Especially considering the price.
This infomercial didn't go down well with viewers by the looks of things
Hmm i dont know.
For me this is almost the same as downloading it from the internet.🤔
$1500 in 2004 is now about$2500 per the CPI Calculator
the thing anout spartphone app devices that scares me is you usually have no use for it without a recent generation smartphone. and in the future it might very well become unusable because either it's app would be incomparybile with newer generation of smartphones, company making it get bought up by bigger one and support ger pulled or any of smart devices issues that you don't actually own your hardware. give me hdmi output and some buttons, so i can dig it out in 20 yeras and just turn on
What's with the Nixie tubes (or that's what they look like) behind you?
I moved away from astrophotography to visual observation because the work needed to take photos that I could have downloaded off the net, was taking away from the pleasure of simply seeing what is up there, in real time.
14:50 seems to imply that you can look through it. Is the little girl about to learn a lesson here? Does the eyepiece just let you look at a tiny screen? It's an approach I suppose. A sales approach.
I'm a bit surprised you failed to mention Vaonis' Vespera and Stellina smart telescopes, which got available at the same time, if not before Unistellar's ones. Their scopes are of a much better quality and the on-board algorithms are just one or two magnitudes above those on Unistellar. Just to mention a few functionalities:
– Mosaic mode, which allows you to image areas bigger than the scope field of view and act as a virtual derotator (although Stellina has a physical derotator).
– Continue mode, which allows you to stack the same object over several nights.
– Planning mode, which allows you to program your scope to shoot at targets that are not yet visible.
– Automatic refocus. Objects get out of focus when temperature drops. Vaonis' scopes will refocus automatically before the image gets too blurry.
– Ability to download the individual pictures in FITS format, so that you can process them yourself on the same kind of applications you mentioned using with your former telescope.
Do not buy ANY of Unistellars telescopes. They're an absolute waste of money and the image quality they produce is extremely poor for it's price. The Dwarf 2 and 3, and the Seestar S50 and the new S30 will produce FAR better images. The Seestar, though low resolution, will produce better quality images, and the optics are superior. The Dwarf telescopes have 4k resolution but shorter focal length. These cheaper telescope can be used for other than astronomy. They're very good for terrestrial use also. Dwarf telescopes are capable of taking gigapixel panoramas, as well as spotting. The Seestar will also get a panorama mode soon. If you need something more power, take a look at Vaonis's telescopes. Though more expensive, provide more value than Unistellar. Don't waste your money.
Like Ed Ting says don't do astrophotography, It's a money dump like having a boat. But that is impressive! I have 203mm Dob and it's just fun. But heavy and I used to hate these scopes because I saw them as a buy in cheat code! Now I'm like that's a mighty fine shot of M42. I can't get even close to that with my much more powerful scope. The next years are going to bring us closer to the universe then ever imagined!
I would rather let my eye detect photons that have travelled for millions of years. If one really wants look at photos, there are plenty of better ones online already!
Side note, one can always begin with a Binoculars.
They are quite good enough for some basic observation, cheap and you can always have other uses for them once you decide to build a more power telescope.
Call me an elitist but I hate these things 🤣 The idea is great, the execution is not good. EAA is most definitely the future, but the price point is too high for what you get with this. Without actual glass to look through it is a gimmick. I don’t think they took this far enough tbh. Get rid of the eyepiece or provide actual glass to look through. Stop pretending its a telescope and own the fact it’s a specialized camera. Right now I can do this too by sticking my iPhone up to my telescope. They need to go further with this thing and give it more utility.
Came for the telescope review. Left discovering I was standing just a few feet away from you at Orbital 😂
$350 or $450 for the ZWO S30 or S50 is a lot easier for parents to buy for christmas and if the kids don't like it, maybe the parents will.