Vaonis Stellina Observation Station Smart telescope review - Space.com

The Stellina is easy to control and provides delightful images directly to your phone or tablet within minutes.

The Stellina is like no other telescope you've seen.

The suitcase-shaped instrument is sleek and shiny, and to some extent belies its power to find and take images of a wide range of objects.

The app then stacks these automatically, building up the total exposure time using many individual exposures. .

The Stellina creates its own Wi-Fi hotspot, so you can use it in any location, but bear in mind that you may lose your internet connection while using it.

Star clusters, nebulae and galaxies all appeared with satisfying quality, although the longer the exposure time the better the results.

The same objects would be virtually invisible to the eye under the same conditions, even with a much larger telescope.

The unit has an inbuilt CLS (city light suppression) filter that leaves the images with no trace of light pollution.

Again, for a newcomer, some guidance would be useful because although the app presents you with a range of objects currently visible, your first choice could be a disappointment if you overlook the recommended exposure time.

So our advice is to choose an object that can be photographed with a 15 or 30 minutes exposure time.

You can continue to view the results and choose new targets as long as you remain within the range of its hotspot, about 10 yards.

The Stellina will continue observing even if you are out of range.

You can get equivalent or better results for considerably less money using conventional telescopes and cameras but you need much more expertise

But while you are struggling to connect everything and get some results, the Vaonis Stellina (opens in new tab) will probably have taken several images

The telescope is larger and its images contain more detail

If you are prepared to build your own system, you could achieve similar results for a fraction of the cost, although with more time required to set up the instrument and process the images — and without the convenient package

If you simply want a visual instrument that will help you find a wide range of objects, then the Celestron StarSense range provides a choice of refracting and reflecting telescopes that will use your smartphone to help you find objects

For example, the Celestron StarSense DX 130AZ reflector is an easy-to-use 130 mm reflector at under a tenth of the cost of the Stellina

To dip your toe into astro-imaging and get similar results to the Stellina, you could use a Sky-Watcher Evostar-72 ED DS-Pro 72 mm refractor (opens in new tab) on a Sky-Watcher AZ-GTi altazimuth Go To (opens in new tab)mount that can also be controlled using an app. 

You'd need to add an astro camera such as the ZWO ASI178 MC (opens in new tab), which uses the same sensor as the Stellina camera, plus either a laptop or an additional ASIAIR module to control it using a phone or tablet

The total cost of this is about a third that of the Stellina, but it requires some technical understanding to get good results