Unistellar is releasing two new smart telescopes that are designed to make astronomy easier and clearer for people living in cities.
The Unistellar Odyssey and the Odyssey Pro are smart telescopes that work in conjunction with a mobile app that points the telescope at interesting objects in the sky and displays the captured images on a smartphone and tablet. In fact, only the Odyssey Pro has a conventional eyepiece—the regular Odyssey only lets you view images on your mobile device.
This new generation of devices, which are being launched at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, are designed specifically with people living in light-polluted inner-city areas in mind.
“Normal telescopes have two big problems,” said Laurent Marfisi, CEO and co-founder at Unistellar. “The first is that you don’t see much in the telescope, apart from the moon and the main planets [Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars].”
“So, we built a telescope that could really see the yonder, the galaxies, and particularly the comets—hundreds of them hidden in the sky.”
Skywatchers would normally need different telescopes to see both closer objects, such as planets, as well as deep sky objects such as nebulae. However, Marfisi claims the Odyssey range will let you see both, even from light polluted areas. This is thanks to a patented pixel-binning technology—similar to that used in smartphone cameras—that allows the telescope’s sensor to be used in two different modes.
The first mode uses the sensor’s full resolution to capture the closer objects such as planets, which are very bright, but very small compared to galaxies and nebulae. “When you see Jupiter, it looks like a bright star in the sky,” said Marfisi. “That’s because it’s quite small. To observe that you need as much resolution as you can get.”
When trying to view galaxies or nebulae, the problem is their lack of brightness. So here the telescope uses pixel binning to capture more light, at the expense of some detail. “To give you an example, if the Andromeda Galaxy was as bright as the moon, you would see an object that is almost three times as big as the [full] moon in the sky,” said Marfisi. “These are very big objects, and so we just bin the pixels together in groups of four, which enhances the size of the pixels on the receptor, which allows a lot more photons per square pixel to be detected.”
Making Astronomy Easier
The second of the big problems with conventional telescopes that Marfisi mentioned above is ease of use—people struggling to find interesting items in the sky.
This is where the accompanying app comes in, automatically pointing the telescope at phenomena in the sky at the right times. The app now not only highlights the key items to look at on that particular evening, it provides contextual information about the object in the sky. For example, it might explain that a nebula exploded thousands of years ago and that the atoms that were formed from that explosion may create future planets or stars. “Every time, we are giving a little bit of a story that is part of the grand scheme of how the cosmos works,” said Marfisi.
The other ease-of-use benefit in the new telescopes is a new high performance optical tube developed with Nikon. The problem with telescope mirrors is that they need to be realigned every once in a while, and that’s not a simple task for novices.
“We worked with Nikon to develop the first optical tube that has mirrors that do not need manual adjustments,” said Marfisi. “That allows us to solve this dilemma of having power versus convenience in optics.”
That combined with a new autofocus system, similar to that found on digital cameras, should deliver sharp images of sky objects every time, Marfisi claims.
The Odyssey telescope without the eyepiece will cost $2,499, while the addition of the eyepiece on the Odyssey Pro raises the price to $3,999. There will also be a striking red edition of the Pro telescope that costs $4,499.
