Unistellar Odyssey Pro Review: Astronomy Made Easy

Astronomy is hard. Telescopes are bulky, light pollution ruins much of what they can see anyway, and that’s before we get to Mr. Musk’s fleet of satellites that ruin the view. The Unistellar Odyssey Pro does a stunningly good job of making it easy to see the wonders of the night sky.

This smart telescope and its great app do most of the tedious work for you, letting you choose from a customized menu of objects in the sky to observe. For the casual astronomer who wants to gaze at galaxies without any hassle, it’s hard to imagine a better starting point. Although expensive.

Unistellar Odyssey Pro: How it works

The Odyssey Pro is a serious piece of hardware, as you would expect from a device priced at $3,999.

With a focal length of 320mm and a mirror diameter of 85mm, this lens is capable of capturing nebulae and galaxies that you would hardly believe exist when you look at the same point in the sky with the naked eye.

Its ability to reveal these wonders in the night sky is thanks in part to its pixel-binning technology, which means you can capture these wonders even in cities with heavy light pollution. You can find out more about this in my earlier informative article on the Unistellar Odyssey Pro . I live on the edge of a large city in the south of England and have had no trouble seeing nebulae and galaxies that might otherwise be masked by light pollution.

The telescope has a claimed battery life of five hours, which seems to be just right in my tests, and it provides 64GB of internal memory for taking photos. That might sound like a lot of memory for a 4.1-megapixel sensor, but this telescope works by taking multiple photos of the same object over time, automatically combining them to slowly reveal more detail, like dust lanes. The longer the exposure, the better the image, with hour-long exposures providing the best quality. That’s why you need all that memory.

You don’t have to worry about laboriously adjusting the mirror or focusing, it’s all done automatically. The only thing you really need to worry about is making sure your telescope is level on a sturdy tripod. A bubble level built into the top of the tripod makes this task easier.

Unistellar App

The companion Unistellar app (Android and iOS) is awesome. Not only does it connect to the telescope with ease, but it uses your location data to determine what you’ll be able to see in the sky that night from a specific location. You simply select from a list of planets, nebulae, galaxies, clusters, and stars and let the telescope search for them.

It does this by looking for star patterns in the sky, then using the telescope’s built-in motor to rotate the telescope accordingly. It’s not perfect: It often took a few tries to figure out, even on a clear night, and panning from one object to another was slow. The app doesn’t know if there’s a building or tree in the path of the object you’re looking at, of course, so it can take a few long tries before you can even start looking at something.

When something does get stuck, it’s one of those moments when you drag your family outside and watch them smile as they look at the image. You can view the telescope’s output either through the app or through the eyepiece, the latter of which is what sets the “Pro” model apart from its much cheaper counterpart.

The eyepiece is an electronic viewfinder, and I found no greater satisfaction in looking at planets or galaxies than I did on my phone’s screen. I’d certainly be willing to save $1,500 and go for the regular Odyssey without the eyepiece.

You also need to moderate your expectations of the image quality you’ll get from your observations. We’re spoiled for choice with the stunningly detailed galaxy images available from sources like NASA’s image library, but of course these are captured on huge, ridiculously sophisticated telescopes.

Unistellar doesn’t help itself with the miniature nebula images on the app that look ten times more dramatic than what you’ll actually capture, but try to forget about those breathtaking images from professional equipment and remember that the images you’re capturing are what you see now, from your backyard. You still get a thrill when you capture something like the M57 ring nebula I saw a few weeks ago (pictured below).

Unistellar Odyssey Pro Verdict

If you’ve always wanted to get into astronomy but were intimidated by its complexity, the Unistellar Odyssey Pro is the answer. Even a novice astronomer like me was able to capture unforgettable images within an hour of taking it out of the box.

As I mentioned above, I would seriously consider upgrading to the eyepiece-less Unistellar Odyssey, which brings the price down to a more acceptable $2,499. It’s still pricey, to be sure, but few pieces of tech will give you as much pleasure as this one.