Look into your smart phone and see space

The new Stellina telescope from Vaonis enables stargazing while looking at a smartphones.

Stellina telescope.

Jerry Seinfeld observed decades ago that Star Trek was his generation’s “ultimate male fantasy”, not because of Captain Kirk’s dalliances with green women but because the bridge of the USS Enterprise featured a big chair and a bigger screen.

“Just hurtling through space in your living room, watching TV,” the comedian quipped. With the new Stellina telescope from Vaonis, all galactic beings can approximate this sci-fi fantasy, stargazing while staring at their phones. Vaonis bills its device (about $6445, vaonis.com) as the world’s first connected, all-in-one telescope revealing mysteries of deep space on command via phones and tablets. As you may imagine, your first stop on this cosmic adventure is an app store.

From there, set-up is simple, although the machine, a white, roughly 8kg U-shaped body with a pivoting lens housed in its centre, takes a few minutes to orient itself. Once calibrated, Stellina can automatically point itself towards any of a hundred-plus preset nebulae, star clusters, galaxies and other points of astronomical interest. Calling Stellina a telescope is a bit of a misnomer. V

aonis describes it as an “observation station” but it’s really an astrophotography lab you can haul around in a large backpack. Stellina repeatedly captures images of a distant object — often for up to an hour — then overlays those images to turn a mere smudge of light into a crisply rendered view accessed on your handheld device via the app. On-screen, you can fiddle with various filters and processors to easily amplify image quality. That said, the radius of Stellina’s on-board wi-fi system is frustratingly small — our screen lost its link when we were even a few paces away.

Those seeking a more direct cosmic connection might wait until February, when the crowdfunded Unistellar eVscope ships for US$2999 ($4381). The start-up, which has a “citizen science” partnership with the SETI Institute, boasts that its smart scope is 100 times more powerful than a classic at-home telescope, while retaining the all-important-to-some, familiar eyepiece.

Stellina telescope, Vaonis, $US4412