Astronomy is hard. Telescopes are fiddly, light pollution ruins much of what they can see anyway, and that’s before we even get to Mr Musk’s fleet of satellites spoiling the view. The Unistellar Odyssey Pro does a stunningly good job of making it simple to observe the wonders of the night sky.
This smart telescope and its superb accompanying app do much of the tedious work for you, letting you pick from a tailored menu of objects to observe in the sky. For the casual astronomer who wants a fuss-free gawp at the galaxies, it’s hard to think of a better starting point. Albeit an expensive one.
Unistellar Odyssey Pro: How It Works
The Odyssey Pro is a serious piece of kit, as you would expect for a device costing $3,999.
With a focal length of 320mm and mirror diameter of 85mm, it’s capable of capturing nebula and galaxies that you can scarcely believe are there when you stare at the same spot of sky with the naked eye.
Its ability to reveal these marvels in the night sky is partly down to its pixel binning technology, which means you can capture these wonders even in heavily light-polluted cities. You can find out more about this in my earlier news article on the Unistellar Odyssey Pro. I live on the edge of large town in the south of England, and had no problems seeing nebulae and galaxies, which might otherwise be masked by light pollution.
The telescope has a claimed battery life of five hours, which seems about right in my tests, and provides 64GB of internal storage for images you capture. That might sound like a lot of storage for a 4.1-megapixel sensor, but this telescope works by capturing multiple images of the same object over time, automatically stacking the images together to slowly reveal more detail such as dust lanes. The longer the exposure, the better the image, with hour-long exposures delivering the best quality. That’s why you need all that storage.
You don’t need to worry about fiddly mirror alignment or focusing, all that’s handled automatically. The only thing you really need worry about is making sure the telescope is level atop its sturdy tripod. A spirit level bubble built into the top of the tripod eases this task.
The Unistellar App
The accompanying Unistellar app (Android and iOS) is tremendous. Not only does it connect to the telescope with ease, but uses location data to identify what you’ll be able to see in the sky that night from your specific spot. You simply take your pick from the list of planets, nebulae, galaxies, clusters and stars and let the telescope get on with finding them.
It does this by looking for star patterns in the sky and then using the telescope’s built-in motor to rotate the telescope accordingly. It’s not perfect: on more than one occasion it took several attempts to orient itself, even on a cloud-free night, and slewing from one object to the next is slow. The app obviously doesn’t know if there’s a building or tree in the way of your chosen item, either, so it can take several lengthy attempts before you’re looking at anything at all.
When it does lock in on something, however, it’s one of those moments where you drag the family outside and watch the smiles form as they look at the image. You can view the telescopes output either through the app or the eyepiece, the latter being what sets the “Pro” model apart from its much cheaper sibling.
The eyepiece is an electronic viewfinder, and I didn’t find looking at planets or galaxies through it any more satisfying than I did from my phone’s screen. I’d certainly be tempted to save $1,500 and plump for the regular Odyssey model without the eyepiece.
You also need to moderate your expectations of the image quality you’re going to get from your observations. We’re spoiled by the jaw-droppingly detailed images of galaxies available from sources such as the NASA image library, but they are of course captured on enormous, ridiculously sophisticated telescopes.
Unistellar doesn’t help itself with thumbnail images of nebulae in the app that look ten times more dramatic than what you’ll actually be able to capture, but try and forget about those breathtaking images from professional kit and remember the images you’re capturing are what you’re seeing right now, from your back garden. There’s still a tingle of excitement when you capture something like the M57 ring nebula I saw a couple of weeks ago (pictured below).
Unistellar Odyssey Pro Verdict
If you’ve always wanted to get into astronomy but have been intimidated by its sheer complexity, the Unistellar Odyssey Pro is the solution. Even a shambling astronomy amateur like me managed to capture memorable images within an hour of taking it out of the box.
As I stated above, I’d seriously consider trading down to the Unistellar Odyssey without the eyepiece, which brings the price down to a more palatable $2,499. It’s still expensive, for sure, but few pieces of technology will give you as much pleasure as this.
