The Unistellar Odyssey Pro ($3,999) is one of the few smart telescopes that not only lets you photograph celestial objects but observe them in an eyepiece in addition to your phone or tablet. This feature makes the Odyssey Pro a good choice for small gatherings, star parties, and public events. In addition, the Odyssey Pro is simply a powerful scope that’s easy to set up and use. That said, the inclusion of the digital eyepiece comes with a $1,700 price increase over the standard Unistellar Odyssey ($2,299), which, apart from lacking the eyepiece and having a slightly lower resolution, is identical to the Pro.
Design and Specs: A Smart Telescope With a Visual Upgrade
Unistellar, a French company, exclusively makes smart telescopes and has been selling them since 2020. The Odyssey Pro and the Odyssey are the smallest and lightest of the company’s offerings. The base model lacks an electronic eyepiece and has a slightly lower (3.4MP) resolution but is otherwise identical to the Pro.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Odyssey Pro consists of two pieces: the telescope tube, which is attached to the mount, and an extendable aluminum tripod. The base of the mount fits into a ring at the top of the tripod, where it is secured with two set screws. The mount is an altazimuth (turret-style) unit: It can rotate to point the tube in any direction. The tube can swing vertically, so you can position it to point straight up at the zenith, horizontally at eye level, or anywhere in between.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The Odyssey Pro is a reflecting telescope that uses an 85mm diameter mirror to gather light from whatever object the scope is pointing at and reflect it back to an electronic sensor. Its mirror is relatively large compared with the 50mm lens of the $499 ZWO Seestar S50, which allows the Odyssey Pro to discern fainter objects than the S50.
Unistellar’s eVscope 2 ($4,899) and eQuinox 2 ($2,499) telescopes each have 114mm mirrors. However, their mirrors require collimation (adjustment by the user), which isn’t the case with the Odyssey line. Those models also require manual focusing, while the Odyssey Pro and Odyssey exclusively use autofocus.
At the front of the Unistellar Odyssey Pro’s tube, an array of four vanes secures the sensor in place in the center (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Four thin vanes secure the Odyssey Pro’s sensor in the center of the front of the tube, creating a rayed pattern that appears to emanate from bright stars in images captured by the scope. Although I usually find this effect to be pleasing, there were times when, in taking a long exposure to image a faint galaxy or nebula located near a bright star, this “starburst” effect washed out fine detail in the object being photographed.
The fuzzy, roundish “star” to the upper left of the bright star Mirach in the constellation Andromeda, at the 11:00 position, is actually a galaxy, NGC 404 (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
The sensor, a Sony IMX415, is set in portrait orientation and has a resolution of 4.1MP (2,344 by 1,758 pixels) at a 4:3 aspect ratio (a common ratio for digital cameras). Its 0.75-by-0.54-degree (WH) field of view of is small, even smaller than the Seestar S50’s (0.73 by 1.29 degrees). It is just tall enough to fit the Sun or Moon, both of which have an angular diameter of about 0.5 degrees, in the frame. These two objects feel cramped to me when placed in the Odyssey Pro’s circular frame, which barely fits around them. It doesn’t help that the solar images it captures have a dark band around their circumference. Both the Sun and Moon look better and more natural to me when not encased by the frame. You can always extend the black background vertically a bit in a program like Photoshop if having more of a border is to your liking.
Gibbous Moon (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
The narrow field of view helps maximize the resolution of the objects being imaged, but it also means that many objects will be too large to fit into a single image. Examples of those are the Andromeda Galaxy, Markarian’s Chain, and the Veil and California Nebulae. Others, such as Caroline’s Rose, Helix Nebula, and Triangulum Galaxy, are near-perfect fits.
The Triangulum Galaxy (M33) is the third largest galaxy in our Local Group, after the Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
Unlike the Seestar S50 and the Dwarflab Dwarf 3 ($549), the Odyssey Pro does not support a mosaic mode, which lets you frame an area larger than the field of view for the scope to take multiple overlapping images and automatically stitch them together. You could shoot an image with the Odyssey Pro, use the app’s Move function to image an adjacent part of the field of view, and combine them using third-party software, but it would not be convenient.
Hidden Galaxy (IC 342) (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
The Digital Eyepiece
What sets the Odyssey Pro apart from other smart telescopes (except for Unistellar’s own eVscope 2) is the inclusion of a Nikon-designed digital eyepiece to provide a more traditional viewing experience. Most smart telescopes, including the base-level Odyssey, are pure astrographs, meaning that they are for photography only. They don’t have an eyepiece you can look through, so you can only view the object you are imaging on your mobile device screen via the telescope’s companion app.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
When you look through the Odyssey Pro’s eyepiece, you are not actually viewing light from whatever object the scope is pointing at, as you would with a purely optical telescope’s eyepiece. Instead, you are seeing an image, displayed on an OLED screen, of light captured by the scope’s sensor that is converted into electrical impulses and captured in pixels, essentially the same digital image that is being simultaneously captured on your phone or tablet. However the eyepiece offers a wide view, and it is immersive and vivid. The image transmitted by the OLED display is focused on infinity, letting your eyes take in the long view.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
On the side of the eyepiece is a tiny wheel (diopter) you can turn to focus the image to match your eyesight. It is especially helpful if you are letting a group of people look through the scope. I only wish that Unistellar had made the wheel a little larger, because it’s hard to manipulate.
Setup and Operation: Stargazing With the Odyssey Pro
Setting the Odyssey Pro up for observing the night sky is very simple. The tripod, which has three levels of extension, feels very sturdy. On top of the tripod is a little spirit level you can use to adjust the legs to make sure the tripod is even. The first time I set the scope up, I was amazed that the bubble was exactly centered. Then, you lift the scope, lower the bottom of the mount through the ring at the center of the tripod, and lock it in place.
The Odyssey Pro is powered by a lithium-ion battery that lasted up to five hours on a charge in testing, which is as advertised. For longer shoots, you can connect an external power bank through the telescope’s USB-C port.
When you press the scope’s power button, it blinks purple for a few seconds and then glows blue. You launch the Unistellar app (available on Android and iOS) on your mobile device and press the Connect Your Telescope button on the home screen. You connect first by Bluetooth and then to the scope’s internal Wi-Fi. After you have done this for several observing sessions, the app will often connect automatically when the telescope is turned on.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Once connected, tap the Catalog tab to reveal a number of celestial objects you can choose from. You can filter your choices by selecting one or more types of objects (asteroids, clusters, comets, galaxies, nebulae, planets, and stars), and thumbnails of the best such currently visible objects will appear.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Once you have made your selection, the Odyssey Pro will slew to the object in question—on your screen, you can see stars pass through the field of view. The scope will stop at several points to take an image and compare it with its internal star atlas and should soon arrive at the object in question.
Occasionally, the scope was fooled, say, if it had to slew through trees or patchy clouds, and a couple of times, the autofocus exhibited a significant delay. While testing the Odyssey Pro in NYC this winter, I would often bring it from the relative warmth of my apartment into the frigid night. Reflecting telescopes generally take longer than refractors (lens-based scopes) to adjust to temperature change, and it would often take a half hour or more of acclimation for the scope to achieve the focus necessary to resolve, say, detail on planets. When the scope didn’t find the object I was seeking, I would send it to another object and then back to the one I wanted to observe—this almost always fixed the problem.
(Credit: Tony Hoffman)
The City and the Stars
When testing a telescope, I try to do so under varying sky conditions and phases of the Moon and from multiple locations ranging from dark rural sites to my own urban neighborhood. While testing the Odyssey Pro, between the weather and my own schedule, I was only able to get to a dark-sky site on three occasions. I did the rest of my testing (on close to 20 nights) locally, where both ambient light from streetlights and apartments and the pervasive New York City skyglow make observing and astrophotography a challenge. The Odyssey Pro more than proved its mettle for urban observing.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Vision Tweaks
Unistellar uses what it calls Deep Dark Technology to counteract the effects of light pollution, or skyglow, which is especially prevalent in urban areas, and to reduce or eliminate image noise. This produces a near-uniform black background that generally improves the contrast between the sky and the object being photographed and gives the image a more natural look. As a possible downside, the Odyssey Pro often had trouble picking up faint nebulosity as well as subtle detail in galaxies, and its Deep Dark Technology may have played a role in that.
Open star clusters M35 and NGC 2158 in Gemini (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
Another enhancement that the Odyssey Pro offers is called Vivid Vision Technology (VVT), which can be activated by toggling a button after you have been imaging an object for a couple of minutes. VVT brings out the colors of stars, nebulae, and other objects and can brighten and, in some cases, reveal detail in faint galaxies. Unistellar combined the star color information from thousands of hours of user observations and calibrated it against results from the Gaia DR3 star catalog to refine the star colors.
The feature seems to work best for open star clusters, such as in the image of M35 and NGC 2158 above, and planetary nebulae like the Helix Nebula below. The colors of star clusters are often distinct and vivid in VVT mode, sometimes to the point that I will dial down the saturation a bit in Photoshop, though I usually prefer the effect to the bland, nearly colorless stars I have seen in images from other smart telescopes.
The Helix Nebula in Aquarius is a planetary nebula, formed when its central star, in its last stages of life, ejected its outer layers of gas (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
With other objects, particularly some diffuse nebulae, VVT is less appealing to me. When I first imaged the Orion Nebula, I was taken aback by its almost garish pinks and purples, compared with the gentler red-pink hues of most of the Orion Nebula images I have made with other scopes. You have the option of toggling VVT on and off using the aforementioned button.
By default, when you finish an image composed of automatically stacked four-second exposures, you will get both a full-resolution version and a square, framed version such as the one of Caroline’s Rose (NGC 7789), both in PNG format, saved to your mobile device.
Caroline’s Rose (NGC 7789) is an open str cluster discovered by Caroline Herschel, a pioneering female astronomer and the sister of William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
Data Downloads
The Odyssey Pro also saves image data to its 64GB internal memory, and users who want to work with the individual frames that comprise the processed images saved to their phone or tablet can download them from the scope to their computer. With the Seestar S50 and the Dwarf III, you can download data over a USB cable to your computer, which sees the telescope’s memory as a mass storage device, but with the Odyssey Pro, you need to transfer data via Wi-Fi.
With your telescope connected to the Unistellar app, you choose the Experimental area or Laboratory tab from the Settings menu. By enabling direct access to your raw data, you are given the URL for an IP address. You then connect your computer to the telescope’s Wi-Fi and enter the provided URL in your computer’s web browser. This will reveal thumbnails of all the data available. You can choose which items to download (or delete) and in what format you want to receive the data (FITS, TIFF, or PNG). Then, you click the Download button, and if you’ve selected a lot of items, be prepared to wait. I tried this on two different computers, and downloading all the available data in FITS format took at least an hour in each case.
If this all sounds a bit convoluted, it is. And for me, it often proved problematic. I would get a notice that the download was blocked due to the site being insecure; it would still go through the motions of downloading the data but usually would not save it, although I did manage to get the FITS data a few times. Many advanced users want to process their own data, and FITS is the preferred format to use with astro image processing software.
Accessories
Unistellar sent me one accessory not included with the scope, the Smart Solar Filter ($199), which lets the Odyssey Pro easily find and image the Sun. It fits over the front of the tube and is magnetically held in place. I will discuss solar imaging in more detail below, but suffice it to say that if you are interested in this aspect of astrophotography, this accessory is worth the investment. The Sun is the only object that the Odyssey Pro can image in the daytime; the scope has no scenery mode like the Seestar S50 and Dwarflab Dwarf III, and is incapable of terrestrial observing.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
One particularly useful accessory that is not included is a backpack ($299) designed for the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro. Its molded-plastic interior securely holds both the telescope tube and tripod, and it has plenty of pockets for accessories. The Odyssey Pro comes in a fold-out cardboard box with a handle so it can double as a carrying case. Although it seemed sturdy enough, with the heavy use I put the scope to, the edges and corners had begun to fray, and the foam padding inside begun to pull loose. I found lugging the box containing the scope and tripod a bit unwieldy, and suspect it would have been easier had I had a backpack to evenly balance the weight. Unistellar and online retailers frequently sell the scope bundled with the backpack for a discount versus buying them separately.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Community
Unistellar has a large and active user community, and many of them are involved in citizen science projects that the company has organized. These include monitoring near-Earth asteroids and comets and observing asteroid occultations (when an asteroid passes in front of a star, causing its light to dim) and exoplanet transits (when a planet crosses the face of its parent star) to help confirm discoveries. Users upload their data to Unistellar, which collects, compiles, and, in some cases, presents or publishes the results.
Comets mighty and plain: Tsuchinshan-Atlas and Schwassmann-Wachmann (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
Imaging Performance: This Scope Goes Deep
Jupiter, with its large moon Io appearing to touch the planet’s right limb, and Io’s shadow eclipsing a spot on Jupiter’s clouds (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
Smart telescopes have a reputation for being poor at imaging planets, largely due to their relatively short focal lengths, but the Odyssey Pro performed better than I had expected in this regard, particularly in handling Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. Based on the image sizes in pixels as well as the sensor’s resolution, the Odyssey Pro seems to employ 4x digital (software-based) zoom on these objects, stacking multiple individual frames while weeding out inferior ones, enabling the image to sharpen over time. Note that I tended to shoot between 30 seconds and a minute.
Capturing detail on these planets can be tricky; it requires steady air (“good seeing” in astro-speak), so I was pleased that the Odyssey Pro performed as well as it did.
When Mars is near Earth, as it has been this fall and winter, it reveals subtle markings that the Odyssey Pro is able to show (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
Mars is a challenging object to photograph with a small scope, but as was the case with Jupiter, the Odyssey Pro performed better than I had anticipated. At best, it showed faint but identifiable dark markings and the hint of a polar cap. I used Sky & Telescope magazine’s Mars Profiler web app to identify the features I had detected. Photographing Mars does require a night with good seeing (steady air), and on several nights, all I got were pictures of a small, blurred disk.
Star Clusters M35 and NGC 2158 (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
I have a fondness for tracking down transient and/or exceptional celestial objects such as comets, supernovae, and quasars. In between imaging more conventional targets—the numerous star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies that populate the skies—I trained the Odyssey Pro on some of these as well. These objects are fascinating in their own right, particularly if you have even a basic knowledge of their nature. When a star explodes as a supernova, it can briefly rival or exceed the brilliance of the entire galaxy in which it is situated. Although quasars appear starlike, they are the intensely luminous cores of active galaxies whose light, in some cases, has been traveling toward us since the universe was far younger than it is today. For our purposes, they can also act as stress tests to determine a telescope’s limits. One of the Odyssey Pro’s fortes is that it does well in capturing faint objects.
Comets C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-Atlas and 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
All told, with the Odyssey Pro, I photographed five quasars, four comets, and three supernovae. For most of the quasars and supernovae, I would simultaneously photograph the same objects with both the Odyssey Pro and my Seestar S50, and the Pro consistently produced clearer, crisper objects with fainter stars visible. With it, for example, I was able to clearly image several quasars that the Seestar could only marginally detect, such as the quasar S5 0014+81, and it did a much better job in sleuthing out several supernovae than the S50.
Quasar S5 0014 +81 (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
Verdict: A Smart Astro Camera for Visual Observers
NGC 891 is sometimes called The Outer Limits Galaxy because an image of it appears in the opening sequence of the show (Credit: Tony Hoffman)
The Unistellar Odyssey Pro is a premium smart telescope that is easy to set up and use. It can record relatively faint objects and produce preprocessed images that are ready to share, though you can download the raw data and process it to your liking. The Odyssey Pro’s signature feature is its Nikon-designed electronic eyepiece, which provides an immersive viewing experience of the image that the telescope is recording. It does, however, increase the price significantly over the Unistellar Odyssey, a nearly identical scope that lacks the eyepiece. Even so, the Odyssey Pro is an enjoyable instrument and one that’s particularly appealing for public outreach and education.
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The Bottom Line
The Unistellar Odyssey Pro is a powerful smart telescope for viewing and photographing deep space, with a built-in eyepiece that offers an immersive digital image of the object it’s pointing at.
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About Tony Hoffman
Senior Analyst, Hardware
