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of over 33,000 photographers and find equipment insurance education and business tools made
specifically for photographers like you. This is the Vaonis Vespera observation station and
this is an astrophotography kit that I put together to do everything the Vespera does
but I put it together using various spare parts I already had around. Despite their very different
looks these two kits are incredibly similar on paper. They use the same camera sensor,
the same optics - identical specs there, the ability to automate most Imaging tasks including
finding deep sky objects, and focusing on them. They also both happen to cost 2500 US dollars
when bought new today and in this video I've put them head to head on the same night and I'm
going to compare what it's like actually using these two setups under the stars and then also
see if there's any difference in the final images that we can create with them. [Music]
Hello my name is Nico and this channel is all about astrophotography. One Trend in
astrophotography is always more automation and by automation I mean the system itself takes
over many of the tasks that we once did manually like figuring out where to point the telescope or
focusing the telescope all these kinds of little things that we used to do with our hands and
this Vespera is on The Cutting Edge of automation Vaonis has really created a very Sleek system for
taking images of the night sky and of course that won't be for everyone but is a bit of a Tech head
Gadget freak kind of person myself I had a blast playing with it but before I jump into a full
review let me start with just a couple disclosures this Vaonis Vespera and all the accessories were
sent to me by Vaonis for the purpose of making a video review but they have no input into what I
will say in the video no money has exchanged hands and when I'm finished reviewing it I'll be sending
this back to them in my spare parts kit the only thing I I didn't purchase myself is the star
Adventurer GTI Mount which is still on extended loan from skywatcher USA so thank you to them
so why am I making this video well Vaonis approached me asking if I wanted to review
the Vespera I I looked into it and I looked at the spec sheet and I realized huh you know
what I have everything I need to make my own Vespera of sorts by putting together various
parts I had lying around or I could cannibalize from other Rigs and then when I totaled what all
that would cost all these parts to buy new it came to 2500 which is exactly what Vaonis
is selling the Vespera for so now I was even more intrigued because you'd think okay these two kits
have the same sensor the same kind of optics they're gonna probably take similar photos
and the overall price is the same so why would you go for this one or this one and basically
what are the advantages and disadvantages of going with something like this the super sleek
Vespera versus my more Frankenstein's monster of a setup over here well that's the main thing I'm
going to explore in this video and of course I've had the chance to take them out under the
stars and do a little bit of head-to-head matchup so we'll compare the images coming
from these kits I took pictures of the horse head nebula at the same time under the exact same sky
so let's first take a look at the Vespera and the reason Vaonis calls this the Vespera observation
station is that it's combined a telescope a motorized mount a camera an autofocuser a computer
and a Wi-Fi antenna all into one streamlined package there's literally just one button on
this to turn it off and on and then after that you have to control it through the app so you do need
an Android or iOS device to use this you don't need cell service so that's important because
often when I'm out uh somewhere dark I might not have good cell service uh this station does create
its own Wi-Fi network that you connect to the Vespera network and then from there setting it up
is very incredibly easy and seamless from taking it out of the box not knowing anything about
it to start taking photos my first object was a dumbbell nebula literally took about 10 minutes
and was incredibly low friction I think anyone could start on astrophotography with this device
I didn't question you know what was happening at any point I enjoyed seeing it work and make little
noises and it was telling me what it was doing on screen and also telling me fun facts about space
this setup on the other hand the spare parts built here took me well over an hour to get going and
even then it wasn't really working to its full potential and keep in mind I'm an experienced
astrophotographer um but this was a new rig so there's always plenty to go wrong with a new
rig one of the things that did go wrong was the ASIAIR plus was new to me I'd been putting off
learning it even though I've had it for a while and so it took me um over an hour partly because I
had major connection issues I'm trying to control the ASIAIR for my Android smartphone basically it
just kept creating that Wi-Fi network allowing me to connect and then disconnecting the Wi-Fi
network would disappear even though I was standing right next to it and this persisted even though I
restarted it a few times but let me make clear I think this was some kind of user error probably
I'm just I'm not trying to diss the ASIAIR I know it's a very popular device but more of what I'm
trying to point out here is that putting together a kit like this one from all these various parts
that you have to know how to use that's going to require a lot more troubleshooting and finessing
before you can make it into a stable Imaging system so your first night your first two nights
maybe even your first several nights out you can expect to have to fine tune this and really get
to grips with how everything here works together and for people like me that's part of the fun of
astrophotography but I can totally see someone else would rather just get on with it and have
a more TurnKey system like this one that's what this Vespera really sort of excels at
and so before I even got this one working I had already taken nice pictures of the dumbbell nebula
and the Cygnus Wall with the Vespera speaking of that Cygnus Wall picture for this shot I tried
no filter and then I tried Vespera's proprietary click-in filter add-ons I tried their dual band
narrow band filter and I gotta say they made this so easy to install a filter you just click here
to unclick the filter empty filter cell you click back in a filter it automatically recognize it's
been installed and changes the settings however it needs to I've never found an easier way to
change out filters than what they've done here I should also point out while we're looking at
the front of the Vespera that Vaonis did send me this review unit out with the hygrometer which is
a tiny little 100 add-on you screw in right here and what that does is it measures the water vapor
in the air so that the system knows how to keep the telescope and the filters free from do and
I don't know without this add-on if we might have had problems with do but I probably would get it
for my environment out here let me take a moment here to speak about this video's sponsor which is
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tell you the truth all my photography and Astro gear is probably one of my biggest Investments
it's worth definitely more than my car so I've often thought that I'd really like to insure
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recovery services that could be a huge deal if you're doing sort of a one-of-a-kind event
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so if that sounds intriguing to you follow the link in the video description for a special
discount on your membership now let's go through some of the pros and the cons of using the Vespera
versus my spare parts build okay starting with ease of use and as you imagine the Vespera is
very easy to use I'm giving it two thumbs up there the spare parts rig I was sort of torn between
you know a pro and a con I would say that for a beginner it there's just too many things to
learn and too many things to go wrong to call it easy to use so I'm gonna give it a thumbs down
for ease of use but keep in mind with that that if you practice a few times you know maybe five
times it can get quite easy to use it's really just a matter of putting in the time but with
the Vespera there's really no downtime it's you immediately understand how to use it it's because
there's just really nothing to learn it does everything pretty much automatically in terms
of weight the whole Vaonis Vespera with all the optional filters in its uh backpack the backpack
you can buy for it weighs 14 pounds so really very lightweight the spare parts rig is just a bit over
20 pounds and that includes the counterweight that comes with the star Adventure GTI so I'd
say both are lightweight but the Vespera is is incredibly lightweight at just 14 pounds total
and in terms of packability the Vaonis Vespera everything fits into a backpack that you can buy
optionally for it it's all very Compact and uh yeah really really packable the spare parts rig
um you know you you could pack it all up uh it's you'd I think you it'd be hard to sort of
fit everything in in a nice way all assembled like it is there so even though you could all
Pat you could pack all of it into a backpack I think you would want to take out all off
all the cables and then reassemble those so it's not quite as uh easy to pack and unpack
okay and then in terms of upgradeability
um the Vaonis Vespera does have a few accessories you can buy the there's a solar filter and narrow
band filter and a light pollution filter and then there's the hygrometer which is
for controlling the the Dew heater and those are really the only upgrades at the moment
um they may came up come out with more but the sort of based on how the Vespera is designed
you sort of have to go with upgrades that Vaonis may provide while the spare parts rig
you could really change out any part of this you could change out the mount you could change out
the Optics you could change out the camera you could add a guide scope which we'll talk about
um so it's completely upgradable you can do anything you want with it
in terms of cost I'm giving these both moderate thumbs down I mean in terms of
what they do they're fairly priced twenty five hundred dollars is just sort of uh what you can
expect if you want this fully automatic system um with autofocus and go to and all that but
I think there are much uh less expensive ways to get into astrophotography that will give you
just as good if not better results so I'm a big advocate for starting with a DSLR and lens and if
you do that from a dark sky with a nice Mount you can get amazing results that way so if you're if
you're not so concerned with all the auto features all the automated features I think you can get a
much less expensive rig going uh because you're not paying for things like an auto focuser or a
mount that has go to when a computer that can do plate solving and all these different features
in terms of flexibility I guess this is sort of similar to upgradability but it's it's related in
the sense that with the spare parts rig I could upgrade something like upgrade to a mono camera
with a narrowband filter and that would very much change the nature of the rig if something's going
wrong I can also quickly change out a single part and get it working again so it's flexible
while with the villainous Vespera if something did go wrong with it I wouldn't have any idea
how to fix it because it's basically a black box of a machine you don't you don't open it
up uh because there's there's no like visible screws or anything it's just it's sort of
like a an iPhone or something you know so in terms of flexibility it's it's not the best
and then in terms of the results I think both did pretty well I'm going to show those right now
um and you can decide for yourself of course but I would give them both a thumbs up
So let's move over to PixInsight here and we can look at some of the results
now since these were using the exact same Optics a 200 millimeter focal length lens at F4 with
the same chip an IMX 462 by Sony the single frames look remarkably similar you can see the
composition is slightly different in terms of the rotation that wasn't something I really had much
control over but the horse head is centered on both you can see spot sizes of stars are similar
the amount of detail the amount of noise all of this is very similar in a single frame now where
I got a little bit more interesting is in um the full integration of of about 70 minutes on each
so here is the full integration of my spare parts kit and now let's look at that compared
to the full integration with the Vespera and there are some minor uh color differences I don't know
what to account for that but they this one just looks like a little bit more of magenta on the
Vespera but I don't I don't know why exactly um the main thing though that I've I notice
if we zoom in on both and if we sort of look at yes this area right here
this is what I call walking noise but see how on the Vespera The Walking noise is curved well on
my kit the walking noise is very much in these straight diagonal lines which we are are very
common uh with an equatorial mount that isn't Auto guided or that isn't dithered between Auto
guided exposures um I don't know if I really have a preference between these two examples of walking
noise but it is interesting how with the alt-az mount we get the curved and with the equatorial
Mount we get the straight walking noise and this plays out in the rejection patterns as
well you can see because this is an alt-az mount you get all of this field rotation and that also
means that over time you lose more and more of the frame so if we went out to two hours
or three hours we would start losing even more of the overall frame due to that field rotation
well that's not true with a equatorial amount although if your polar alignment isn't very
good you'll get worse and worse walking noise like we see here now uh to go back to
our chart and I was talking about upgradability and flexibility with the spare parts rig if we
were to add on a cheap guide scope and auto guiding camera we could really minimize this
walking noise or basically eliminate it because if you auto guide your exposures and then you
dither occasionally between sub-exposures you can break up this noise pattern that's created
and get a very clean result well with the Vespera I haven't seen anything about dithering it should
be possible for them to dither even without Auto guiding just by because it's controlling the
pointing it can do plate solving and all that so I could see in a future upgrade maybe they could
introduce that in the software okay A little bit of an editor's update here while I've been working
on this video uh Vaonis released this Mosaic or panorama mode on both the Vespera and the Stelina
and when I was reading through this article I was definitely interested in trying it but then I got
down to this paragraph and it says that the way this Mosaic mode works is actually through the
dithering effect and they specifically call out that this is going to have an impact on inherent
defects of the sensor noise and hot pixels so I really want to try this but at the same time I
need to get this video out so uh for now we'll just have to trust that this does really work
and it would definitely even uh the score a bit I think between my spare parts rig and the Vaonis
Vespera because with my spare parts rig I would have to add on a guide scope and guide camera in
order to dither between exposures well with the the onus telescope you can do it through this
Mosaic mode now again I haven't tried this so I don't know how easy it is if there's any drawbacks
but it seems like it would it would just be the way to go with this telescope so very exciting
news if you already own this telescope and if you've tried it let me know in the comments and
let everyone know how it works but in any case uh I think you can see that with either of these
final results uh you could process them to sort of minimize this noise in the dark areas and and
get a very nice end result I don't see a huge a major difference between these two in terms of
signal to noise Ratio or star size or anything like that so I think you could be quite happy
using either setup so I think that's it for this one I'd be happy to answer any questions in the
comments as always and until next time this is Nico Carver, Nebula Photos, Clear skies!