Why The Unistellar Odyssey Pro Is My Favorite Smart Scope Ever - NOT for Astrophotography Though!

hi everyone this next to me is the Odyssey Pro a new smart telescope by the company unistellar today I will be showing you how it works it is a little bit different from the usual smart telescope reviews in that I have had this for months I've been using it for a long time so I have quite a lot of experience that I have gathered over this time so I will be sharing all my findings with you and I will also be demonstrating um how it works as soon as the sun goes down my name is Lisa and this is the space koala Channel full disclaimer this video is in no way sponsored by the company unisell I bought this from a retailer with my own money full price a few months ago there are now literally dozens of smart telescopes available on the market so what if anything makes the Odyssey or in this case the Odyssey Pro special if you haven't seen this telescope before it might seem like a novelty however the company making it Unis seller is actually one of the ogs in the world of smart telescopes in fact they started their first Kickstarter for the original product that at the time was called eope back in 2018 when nobody else in the world even knew what a smart telescope it was in fact I don't believe they referred to it as a smart telescope because I don't think that term had been coined just yet so they are in no way new to the market but it is a new and improved product in astronomy in general I think everyone agrees that the larger the telescope is the better it is and this is one of the reasons that people historically have transitioned from lens-based reflectors to mirror based newtonians that is both for the consideration of the physical size the weight of the item as well as the cost now mirrors are much cheaper to produce than lenses and this is why people can afford to have a much larger Newtonian than the size of the largest refractor they can afford and also that they can conveniently carry because they also become very heavy when it comes to Smart telescopes however all the other options on the market are lens based and that is because smart telescopes are meant to be this super easy plug- Inplay sort of thing where well the user is not expected to have any prior knowledge of astronomy or telescopes or any of that and they should just be able to purchase the product read the manual go outside and have a look at some deep Sky objects ideally this is why it's a good idea to make them refractors because refractors when they're config correctly in the factory don't have to be touched at all there there's no need for recating the lenses doing any sort of optical alignment like that whereas it is usually a requirement for newtonians or mirror based telescopes you have to be able to colate the telescope which is not a huge deal but understandably it can seem like a daunting exercise to have to set up the Optics of your telescope when you don't even know how to do it now this little telescope is packed with a lot of different kinds of new technology and one of them is actually claiming that they remove the need for colation and therefore they enable you to have a larger aperture still maintaining a very portable telescope this company is not new to the market at all their original product the EV scope and then the Equinox they came out at the same time they've been around for quite a few years and I actually had the chance to own the original EV scope and then I liked it a lot so then I upgraded to the E scope too and now when this came out the more portable version The Odyssey I upgraded to this one as well because I find that actually between all the smart telescopes that I have this is the one that I end up using the most that is not because I'm using it for astrophotography that is because I'm using it for a range of other uses now when I say it's portable it really is the whole thing weighs about 4 kg so that's just under 9 lb it has a mirror diameter of 85 mm and a focal length of 300 20 mm so that brings it to F 3.9 so this is the pro version which has this fake IPS I'll get into it in a second whereas the regular one does not have the IP so you can only connect to it via the phone so this is similar to a Newtonian design but on a Newtonian we would usually have an i piece here so what is happening here is in place of the actual secondary mirror we have a sensor so it is just reflecting the light from the primary mirror into the sensor and what you have in the eyepiece here is just a display now I'm aware of how ridiculous that sounds and I'm there with you because I was of the same opinion when I first found out about this product back in like 2020 and I was hugely skeptical because what's the point I can just look at it on my phone screen but my experience and the experience of many many people show that while you're using it you still have a connection to the instrument so you still get the feeling of looking into the instrument and looking at this face of course you know that you're not looking at the real photons you're looking at an OLED display but in return you can see things that you would never be able to see with a telescope of this diameter and you can see colors that you would never be able to see with a telescope of any diameter because they're just wavelengths that our eyes can't see and this is the actual reason this and its predecessors the EV scope the original EV scope and then EV scope to have been the smart telescopes that I have been using the most overall over the past four years and that is because this is really overall a great instrument for observation especially from under City Skies now my content online focuses a lot on astrophotography but in real life I do a lot of other activities such as my own Outreach events in my local community events at my local Observatory some sidewalk astronomy events and so on and so instrument like this means that I get to show deep Sky objects to people from the city center now of course if you're a super serious visualist you will take a huge tonian and you will go to Dark Skies but if you just want to show the sky to your local community to the kids in the neighborhood and all that they will not drive two hours to go out to the middle of nowhere at night to look into a telescope and see a faint fuzzy structure that if their eyes are not accommodated to it they they don't appreciate what it is anyway and so I know I said this is all great and you're already wondering how much it costs so this is the smaller version which is the Odyssey which Sals for $2,300 for the regular version and then $44,000 for the pro version with the ipce now that is a lot of money and we we get into it in a second whether it's it's reasonable or not but if you're willing to spend so much and if you can I would really opt for the pro version because I think that's what really makes the difference versus buying something much more affordable for $500 and looking at the cell phone screen so how can it possibly cost so much if we already said that mirrors are supposed to be cheaper there's a lot of technology that is supposed to be packed inside this little instrument and some of it is truly unique and revolutionary some of it is just really good marketing but nothing unique at all the first one of these Technologies they call enhanced vision and all that is is just LIF stacking the telescope like all other smart telescopes take short exposures of the deep sky and then they start life stacking that's all that is and they came out with this fancy name enhanced Vision the difference is that this telescope takes exposures of 4 seconds versus most other models that tend to do 10-second exposures of course there is more processing needed but the stacking actually works really well it is quite fast and you start seeing the results on the screen almost immediately what is unique however about their Liv stacking or enhanced vision technology is that they use an algorithm called Dynamic signal amplification they use reference data to understand if they're outliers in the image for example satellite Trail would be Auto rejected and this is something that none of the other smart telescopes do and actually it is quite smart because I don't think it is that difficult to implement if you have the reference images the second special technology that they claim to have is the smart starfinder and that is another fancy name for a technology that all other smart telescopes and even not smart telescopes like everybody who is using astrophotography uses and that is called plate solving essentially it points to an area of the sky it analyzes the position of the Stars against some star cataloges and then it understands the orientation and based on that it is able to go to your desired Target then the next feature we have is called unisell Deep Dark technology and here finally we arrive to something that is unique about this instrument this is both a pro and a con depending on how you view it they collect all the photos that you take of the sky on their servers and then they use it for different purposes mostly to improve these features for example the deep dark technology but they do essentially is they compare the Flux Of Stars against reference data and they do live background extraction meaning they're able to reject or subtract sky gradients and other irrelevant things that could be a very important factor if you're observing from the city and this is how even with such a small diameter you're able to see quite nice data with such short exposures of deep Sky objects and then finally we have what they call the Vivid vision technology and what this is is this automatic processing of the stack that you collect with the telescope they use things like Spectra photometric color calibration they analyze the stars in your image against known Spectra of stars in the sky this way they're able to ensure that the color balance of the image is correct and therefore they're able to increase the saturation so you start seeing very Vivid images much sooner on in my experience this automatic algorithm works great on some images and it is really painful to see on some others there are also many other small features that don't really have names but as of now are unique to this range of telescopes for example you can do Liv stacking of planets and they do that in video mode none of the other smart telescopes are currently doing that and then you're essentially able to do Lucky Imaging with a smart telescope and you get out a small little stack obviously with 85 mm you're still not going to see I don't know what level of detail but you can see the stripes of Jupiter really well you can see the rings of Saturn really well you can see some surface detail on Mars and so on if your local seeing allows it this is all about the software technology that is used but the hardware is also quite unique so they've been working together with Nikon and this current iteration uh they have been able to fix the primary mirror in a way that it is completely stuck in place it's not just that there's no need to cumate it you cannot cumate it because it is physically fixed there which means you can travel with it you can well hopefully not drop it but you can really shake it and move it a lot and it will never go out of colation and that that is great because you can use it as a refractor but it is a reflector with a larger diameter the same thing goes for the eyepiece that is also made by Nikon it has a very nice high resolution OLED screen in there the only thing giving it away that it is a screen and not a real life image is that the objects are way too bright I I wish there was a way to dim that currently there isn't in terms of the resolution it comes with tiny pixels of 1.45 microns so you are actually over sbled you're getting the absolute maximum out of this telescope that you can now the other interesting thing about this range of telescopes is that they have a citizen Science Program you can upload all your observation data to their servers and you can also choose to participate in different research programs so they have the asteroid occultations where they start campaigns for specific cell occultations of asteroids and you can observe them live but also you can contribute your data to the overall program so that they can do calculations on the asteroids orbit then there's the planetary defense program where you can participate in the tracking of near Earth asteroids so that we can get a better understanding of their exact position and movement then you can also participate in the exoplanets program where you can observe the transits of of known exoplanets and you can participate in trying to find new ones then there's the comet program when you can contribute your Comet observations to the monitoring of commentary outbursts then there's the cosmic cataclysms program studying Supernova and finally there is the satellites program in which you can use your data to monitor the impact that artificial satellites have on our night sky I think that's a good cause and the rest we will see tonight when I do a live demonstration of observing a few deep Sky objects here from my city balcony so it is night time and uh I'm here on my extremely light polluted balcony with the full moon so it is actually a really good occasion to demonstrate what the benefit is of something like this over a visual a regular visual telescope you just turn it on with the single button that it has and then it generates its Wi-Fi you can connect to the Wi-Fi you open the unistellar app and then uh you see this it is right now in this parked position you go into watch and then you can manually slew the scope to start this is because if you are like near a house then it wants to be able to orient itself even if you're not seeing the entire sky and then I point it a bit downwards and I go on observation telescope orientation first I did the autofocus and then uh it does a plate s on the image and we're ready which means I can actually choose whatever subject I want let's do m42 do a goto the disturbing red light is the one coming from my camera so I think I will turn that off it's definitely not dark here so I don't need the red light okay and we have arrived I mean clearly it is there and you can also see the the digital live view in the eyepiece okay so this is more or less what you see in the live view which is obviously extremely noisy and all that but then you can click on enhan Vision which is the one in the middle and this is when it starts doing the live stacking of 4 second images so it started the counter here at the bottom and you can see that it started adding pictures and you immediately saw that the gradient was removed dynamically so the gradient is removed from the individual images so that it doesn't get added to the stack so you kind of have to let this go for at least a few minutes even for a bright object like a Ryan and when it has enough data you can enable like the smart processing that will bring out more detail and colors and as soon as you get to an amount of data that it deems enough for the smart live processing this Auto button here becomes available and it's Auto turned on by the way and you can see that it's already like super contrasted and the colors are up but I mean it is looking very fake cuz it's only been like 2 minutes I have to say that it looks much less fake in the eyepiece than on this screen let me try to take another video it looks much less bright in there and so I'll leave this here for a while and I will also shoot a couple of other targets tonight and then I will download the images and show you on the computer how they actually turn out and so I'm sitting here at my computer I've downloaded all the files and I've also stacked um some of the pictures manually and I've done some quick processing and all of that just to show you all the images and to kind of prove or show why I said that I think this is the most fun little pseudo visual telescope ever however I would not buy it for as photography I do not use the for photography I never process the images and let's see why to get the images on the computer you have to uh enable the Wi-Fi interface on the telescope itself via the cell phone application and then you can connect to it from your computer and then they have this little mini user interface that you can access from your browser and you have a way of downloading all the files from there of course there are a lot of files if you do a lot of Imaging because you take a picture every four seconds so that translates to a lot of data it does take some time to uh transfer that over FTP but like I said it's not really an issue for me because in my opinion it's not worth downloading the raw images uh let's just see what we get so um this is the folder where I saved everything in and then so for each Target you get a dark frame that is like a master dark and then you get all these stack input files which are essentially the raw files and then at the end you get a stack sum which is the Stacked file itself I have all three targets here in fixing sight so we can quickly go through it and let's start with a single image that you get out of the telescope which is a single 4C image I'm telling you it's a Crab Nebula but it could be anything because obviously you don't see anything on a 4-second image there's not a lot you can understand from what what is going on here then we have the eyepiece enhanced so this is actually uh picture that I downloaded on the phone from the application and this is what actually is a representation of what you see in the IPS I think this image is kind of under selling it because probably the mini like fake ipce in there is just nicer quality than the screen that I see here or whatever screen you're looking at right now um and then it tells you basically uh what the target is how long you had been integrating for in then the date that it was taken on you see that this has been like semi-processed you see that the col the stars are very colorful and all that so this is the automatic processing that you can do and then you have a way of downloading the entire image and you see that this is the entire image that they stacked and you see these strange things on the side and that the stars are not I will see show you in a second that the stars in the corners are not entirely perfect but the this is not something that bothers you anyway because in the eyepiece you only see like the central part of it if I can like overlay it it's something like this so you only see the central part of it and I think that essentially the idea is that that is the corrected field and obviously the more you go out the more aberration you're going to have because I don't think it has a corrector and then we get the stack sum so that is the raw stacked file that you receive and this is the weirdest thing ever they give it to you in an unded format and I don't understand how this can be but essentially this is in black and white as you can see and you can see the the bear pattern so in order to get a color image from this you would have to debear it by the way it also comes with like this info file which has all this information half of it is I feel like it's incorrect because they tell you that the bare pattern is gbg and that is just simply not true because if I de bear it in gbg then I get this image which is still you can see the the bear pattern so that is the incorrect um bear pattern what you have to do is rggb and then you get the correct colors and you don't see the the checkered pattern anymore you can easily see that this is the the correct one anyway this is not a real issue I just think it's weird that they tell you the wrong information um and then finally I try to process so this is actually not the stack that they gave me but this is a stack that I processed myself using the master dark and then all the light frames um that I took that night and this is the best I was able to get and honestly I think that some of the enhancing that they do is just better than what we're able to do do afterwards it looks a bit different like you see more of the faint detail because they clip the background very much but is it a nice picture probably not um I think that it gives you a much more fun thing to look at directly in the eyepiece versus putting in literally hours of work because we're talking about like maybe a thousand or 2,000 images to stack and just a lot of work to get something that is almost comparable to what you get straight out of there uh that was The Crab Nebula then we have the horse head nebula obviously don't see anything here then we have the IP the enhanced version in the IBS this is what you see and you don't see a lot of the red here this was almost 1 hour of integration time but this is infinitely more than what you would see in a telescope an optical telescope of a comparable size so I think that's still reasonable they don't have um a narrow Bend filter which would make the detection of something like the horse head nebula much easier I think that that is something they could think about then we get the same image that they gave out the autor process version once again the central part is reasonable and then at the edges you have very strange things I think some of these lines are related to the field rotation and then I have no clue what this is at the top and then we get the stack that they provided us once again in black and white and already on the stack you see this stuff here all I can think of is it could be one of their automated processes that has gone wrong and then we get the process let's not even pretend that it's a nice image I genuinely process this to the best of my ability but with field rotation that I had and and all the other stuff I mean you just can't make it into something that it's not of course on their version it looks somewhat better because it's just clipped all the way down I think if I if I did the same thing on my image it would look reasonably similar of course I mean this is just a matter of of taste but you just have to integrate for longer and I think that's the conclusion here and then finally we have m42 here I have a few more images because obviously it is bright so you can already start seeing something on a single image on that single image you see that these stars in the corners are not quite perfect but again you don't really care about that because in my opinion you should only look into the eyepiece and that is a circular thing and it is designed that way then this is the view in the eyepiece if you turn off the enhance functionality the auto enhance and then this is the view in the I piece if you turn it on now you might say that this is exaggerated and I tend to agree however like something in between I think maybe the nebula is done nicely and then the stars are a bit overdone I think that this is something that they could potentially improve over time then I have the entire image that they autor processed again I think the stars are exaggerated the rest of the nebula is nice in terms of color the background is a little bit clipped but a lot of people liked those clipped um backgrounds because obviously you don't see any of the noise then you get the stack some so that is the Stacked images in this case I did a test I processed both the stack that they gave me out of the telescope as well as the stack that I did myself in pix Insight so this is their stack process and this is my own stack processed obviously is cropped in a slightly different way because I just think that I use a different frame for the reference and then because of field rotation you end up with a different field of view is it worth it to be stacking your own images I mean you do get Superior signal to noise ratio in my opinion because objectively it's probably worth it then again this is probably a decent image and even the one that you see directly in the ipce without any sort of processing on your end I think it's a nice image now if you have been looking at pictures of m42 for 10 years and then you have high expectations and you know what it should look like or you have an opinion of what it should look like maybe you're not super impressed with what this is but again I think that the use case of this telescope is mostly Outreach and this brings us to is this telescope worth it who is it for I think in this case this is quite simple if you want to do astrophotography and you're looking for a device that does that it is not for you however if you're interested in the use case where you do Outreach event you want to show deep Sky objects maybe under City Skies to kids to other people you do these sorts of events this telescope is the most amazing thing ever and this is why I said the beginning that this is the Smart telescope that I have been using consistently over the past few years because you just can't beat the convenience of being able to go into the city center and show people obviously you have to be very transparent and manage the expectations explain that this is a digital telescope because if a person has never seen the inside of the telescope before they will not understand that it's a screen and therefore it has to be very clear that it is a digital image that is enhance that they're seeing and you have to explain why we do it and why you see much more detail this way I think the other major use case is for Education as well as maybe astronomical clubs and societies who potentially have a budget to get a telescope like this for events for outreach because it is not cheap um objectively it is not worth it if you only want to take pictures because if you want a smart telescope to take pictures you you can just get a sear and get comparable images obviously they will have lower resolution because of the diameter but they will not be worse in overall quality in my opinion the stars are somewhat nicer and it costs a fraction and if you're not interested in looking into that fake ipce this device doesn't make sense in my opinion for example I would never get the nonpr version which is just the tube with the digital all of it because the eyepiece is the one the largest and the only big selling point that it has to summarize I am a huge fan of this device and maybe you don't get this impression because I keep talking about how it's not for astrophotography because it is not an asop photography device in my opinion this is an amazing device if you want to go out and observe with audo IPS and be able to see things that you would never see unless you went to the darkest skies on Earth and have a large telescope at your disposal and even then you would obviously not see the colors now it is currently a unique offering on the market but Pegasus Astro has announced a while ago that they're going to come out with a smart IP that is planning to do the exact same thing but on any telescope that you have so I think that that will compete with this product and I'm so excited because Pegasus is usually also creating amazing products so I'm very excited to try that out let me know what you think um if you have been thinking about getting the Odyssey or if you're looking forward to the to the Pegasus Astro smart ipce I believe it's called thank you very much for sticking with me and I wish you clear skies

2025-02-19 13:19

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