UNISTELLAR ODYSSEY PRO - Smart Digital Telescope - Beginners and Experienced Users - iPhone and Android Compatible - Autofocus

This telescope has been perfect for our family and friends! First, a little back story: About 15 years ago I purchased a $150 refractor telescope with hopes to introduce my young children to the many celestial wonders out there. I also purchased some additional eye pieces and a barlow lens on top of that. Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed as I suffered the frustrations of trying to show my children planets before they quickly exited the telescope's field of view (and the planets didn't look very good in the scope anyway). After a few attempts of observation over a few months, the telescope was eventually put into storage and never pulled out again. About 10 years later, I thought I'd try again with more sophisticated equipment. So, I purchased a Celestron NexStar 8SE hoping to take advantage of its automatic star-tracking capabilities. The Celestron NexStar 8SE worked well and tracked the stars fairly well, but required quite an effort to set up. With all the various eyepieces, filters, batteries, and other additional equipment I eventually bought to accompany the NexStar, the cost had risen to $2500 or more. And, this doesn't include the laptop we had to bring to help us view things with the NexStar. The problem with this set up is I live in the city (Bortle class 8), and as a result, we usually needed to escape into the country to fully enjoy the NexStar 8SE's capabilities. But, the size of the NexStar 8SE and all its accompanying equipment filled our car up with 3 large bins! This meant that on vacation trips out into the more dark sky areas of the US, we were forced to leave the NexStar behind due to the lack of space. And traveling with the NexStar on dirt roads often meant it had to be collimated before we could use it, which added another layer of time and effort. Enter now the Unistellar Odyssey Pro! We acquired this a few months ago and have so far enjoyed several nights at home in the City viewing faint deep-sky objects! The small size and ease of set-up and use are incredible! We're able to easily move the scope around our trees to get the views we need throughout the night. And, I wasn't expecting an amazing astrophotography unit, yet I've been pleasantly surprised with the images it has produced. Due to the type of scope this is, I wasn't expecting the planetary shots to be outstanding, but they've exceeded my expectations, and images of the deep-sky are even better. This thing even auto-focuses and self-collimates. My children, who are much older now, along with their friends, have been amazed to see these far-distant objects through this telescope and have loved being able to immediately share pics of the objects from their phones. We also purchased the Unistellar backpack, making this scope extremely portable. There is no doubt that the cost of the Odyssey Pro is expensive (and we had to stretch to purchase this one), but in our opinion, it's well worth it for our use case. It's been a great replacement for, and actually not much more costly than, the Celestron NexStar 8SE setup we had eventually built for ourselves--yet, it's so much more portable and easy to use! With the press of a button on the app, the Odyssey Pro slews to the celestial object, focuses itself, and starts stacking images of the object for an amazing view. We've been very pleased so far and look forward to exploring the skies through the upcoming seasons, all from the comfort of our home in the city!

Took this out last night for my first observations and was blown away at how easy this was to quickly produce amazing views. The scope assembly is reasonably light and packs up nicely into the optional backpack. My phone connected easily to the telescopes WiFi network, and then it was as simple as choosing what object in the sky I wanted to look at. The telescope slewed to the target accurately, and within minutes had amazing views to look at through the eyepiece. This is a very expensive telescope, and you can get more functionality for less cost by looking at manual options, however, the easy of use and portability, combined with the computer chip output into the eyepiece I think this will be my favorite scope for showing my friends and family things in the sky. I am already making plans to visit friends to show this off.

I love my Odyssey telescope. I was up and observing the universe in 10 minutes and I am getting spectacular photos of planets, nebulas, star clusters. I have a new hobby!

DO NOT ORDER! The images are not what they show you. It worked once and then stopped working. This is a completely defective product, and when I returned it they tried keeping $800 for a restocking fee! Don’t take the chance and get ripped off by this company. They’ll send you a telescope that wont work or breaks quickly and then you’ll be at a total loss. Not worth the risk

The telescope is quite amazing, and easy to use once you figure it all out. The instructions and online web help are pretty good, but not complete. A scheduled televideo chat with a Unistellar expert was very helpful in filling in the gaps, however.