Vaonis Vespera 2 Smart Telescope
Over a decade ago, I started to get into astrophotography with the Celestron NexStar 6SE and a Canon DSLR camera with various mounts and magnifiers. The results, as you can see to the right, were not impressive. This is an object called the Orion Nebula, and it is one of the brightest deep sky objects you can observe.
Fast forward a few years and I see a Kickstarter for a “smart telescope” called the Hiuni. It features a dedicated image sensor for low light photography and connects to your smart phone for viewing. Unfortunately, the developers went quiet, ghosted the campaign and it never came to fruition.
In January of this year though, I read about a French company called Vaonis and their new Vespera II telescope that had just been released. This was an upgrade from their original Vespera from a few years ago, and it had two very noticeable enhancements.
An increase of the focal length from 200mm to 250mm.
A larger (and newer) Sony IMX585 image sensor, going from 2 megapixels to 8 megapixels.
The price? A mere $A2600 (plus $300 in import taxes). I was in.
Unfortunately for me, the day it arrived I was heading away for a two week work trip. I missed delivery by a mere 90 minutes. The day I arrive home the weather is predicted to be cloudy for the next week. Fortunately for me, there is a one hour break on my second night home and I manage to capture this. Compared to what I got on my “traditional” astrophotography setup, this blew me away. And this image was using the internally stacked JPG.
So what is stacking? This is where a number of images are taken sequentially by the camera, to be later aligned and stacked on top of each other for a combined final image. This reduces noise artefacts and increases the light gain of the image.
The Vespera II allows a few different methods of getting your final image from the night’s capture.
Stacked JPG. This is what the observation station provides as default at the end of the capture ready to be saved to your device. It has internally stacked the images and output them as a compressed JPG photo. This is the easiest method, but also the least impressive.
Stacked TIF. This takes all the images and stores them as a 16 bit uncompressed TIF file. It needs to be exported from the telescope and later edited in a dedicated photo editor. Because of the 16 bit dynamic range and inherit faintness of what’s being captured, the default image will be dark except for the brightest stars. A photo editing program will allow “stretching” of the image to provide a better result. Most of the images in my gallery use this method.
Manually stacked JPG. For this method, a dedicated astrophotography stacker is required, such as SkyStacker. The telescope needs to be FTP’d into to allow transfer of the individual files onto a laptop. The images are stacked and aligned by the software and the result is edited the same way as method 2.
Manually stacked FITS. FITS are uncompressed images and take a LOT of space. Depending on how long you have captured for, you can have over 500 of these images from an observation. It requires the most time and space, but has the potential for the best results.
The Vespera II also has a couple of other neat tricks it can do.
First feature, Live Mosaic is a feature that allows capture larger than the native field of view. It stacks and pans, creating a larger stacked image up to 24 megapixels in size.
The second cool feature is the Plan My Night option. This allows you to select multiple celestial objects that are observable from your location on the date specified. The telescope will provide a window starting at astronomical twilight, and the visibility of the night sky objects for you to select as aline graph.
Multiple objects can be filtered and selected ready for a full night’s capture. The telescope can then be set up and left to its own devices. No need to even wait until its dark or nearby with your phone. In the morning the telescope will remain powered on ready for you to connect and download your new images. It’s so easy!
I am now eagerly looking at the sky every evening to see if I have the chance to create a new observation. I’ve included some of my results so far below and hope to add more soon.
