Vespera Smart Portable Telescope

Whether or not you are a space enthusiast, this gadget is going to make you one. Vespera, a futuristic smart telescope that can be controlled with your phone to take stunning images of stars and galaxies of millions of light-years away. Yes, you heard that right, you can take pictures of galaxies that are hundreds of millions of miles away.

Vespera is fully automated, all you have to do is pair it with your smartphone, choose a co-ordinate to focus on and start the process. The initialization takes about 3 minutes and once that’s done, the telescope takes a series of images of the star/galaxy and overlaps them on top of one another to create a bright final image.

The smartphone app is mandatory to use this telescope. The app gives you recommendations on what to see based on your location, when to see and detailed info on galaxies or stars you are about to capture.

Weighing about 11 pounds, this portable telescope can be carried in your backpack. Since it is powered by a rechargeable battery (lasts about 5 hours), you don’t have to deal with messy wires. The device is so clean and elegant. The foldable action and smooth movements make it look like alien tech.

One thing to note is that the telescope cannot be controlled like a remote car. You cannot move the axes like a camera. Once you set the coordinates through the app, you are done until it returns you back the final image of the galaxy.

Vespera is fully optical. It uses no digital manipulation and it does not even require a wifi or internet for its operation. The time taken to capture an image is directly proportional to how far that object is. For example, capturing an image of our moon takes seconds while capturing the Andromeda galaxy might take minutes.

Although I was not able to test this telescope out in the sky, I was able to see it and the app in person and learn about it. The furthest image taken with Vespera was a picture of a galaxy 160 million light years away. I cannot even imagine that distance. Now, you have a Hubble telescope at your own house!

You can also purchase additional filters such as solar filter to capture our Sun, light pollution filter to remove excess light if you live in a city environment, etc.