Sky & Telescope - March 2020 - 71

p Stellina's view of the September 2019
Harvest Moon. For solar system targets, Stellina shoots individual fraction-of-a-second
exposures and doesn't stack them.

p Left: The first 10-second image in a sequence of exposures of planetary nebula M27, the Dumbbell, always has the object nicely centered. Right: As further exposures are stacked, non-overlapping
areas are cropped out, effectively zooming in on the target. Here's the Dumbbell Nebula after 10
minutes of accumulated exposure time. Note that because of all the computer processing needed to
align and stack 60 frames, the actual elapsed time of the observation was more than 1 hour.

people will be bowled over by the color
images that this little Space Age gizmo
literally puts in their handheld devices.

Northern Hemisphere currently.
Worse, there's no way to add your
own targets. Vaonis states it has no
plans to add that capability, though
it might invite users to suggest new
objects to add during a software update.
But if you want to shoot anything that
isn't in the catalog - such as a bright
new comet - you're out of luck.
Similarly, there is currently no way
to manually change any of Stellina's
settings. You can't tweak the focus,
adjust the tracking rate, or change the
way a target is framed, nor can you
ask the computer to lighten up on the
image processing. Vaonis says more
manual control is in the works and
should be implemented by the time you
read this, though it may not provide as
much control as an experienced amateur would like.

Shortcomings
For the most part Stellina does what
Vaonis says it'll do, and because most of
the "heavy lifting" is done by the internal computer or the app, the concerns
I've raised so far - with the autofocus,
tracking, and image processing - will
no doubt be addressed in future software updates. But I encountered quite a
few other problems as well, and not all
of them are so easily remedied.
The most frustrating problem is the
blue light around the power switch. It is
so bright that you can't get dark-adapted
in Stellina's presence unless you cover
the switch with opaque tape. This is
especially maddening when you discover
that Stellinapp has a night (red-light)
mode. Oh, the irony!
I had trouble maintaining my Wi-Fi
connection to Stellina. When I asked
the company about this, they suggested two possible reasons: Either I had
wandered more than 10 meters (about
30 feet) from the telescope (I had not),
or there might be another Wi-Fi signal
interfering (there was). The problem
went away when I turned off the wireless router in my observatory.
In addition to browsing Stellina's
catalog by object type, you can choose
to display all the targets in one long list.
Well, not that long: I counted 127 -
the Messier objects, a few bright NGC
objects, and the Moon and planets. The
target list is heavily weighted toward the

Final Thoughts
In its online FAQ, Vaonis writes,
"Thanks to its ease of use, you could
think that Stellina is for beginners, but
you'd be making a serious mistake . . . it
also meets all the needs of the advanced
amateur astronomer." The ability to save
FITS images is consistent
with that latter statement, but except for the
purpose of sharing astronomical experiences with
the uninitiated, I don't
think serious amateurs
u Stellina's power switch is
illuminated by a ring of blue
light that is so bright it makes
dark adaptation impossible.

will ﬁnd Stellina particularly satisfying.
Is Stellina worth its hefty price? If
you were to buy a high-quality 80-mm
ED refractor and trick it out with all
the gear that's built in to Stellina, you'd
spend a good fraction of that amount.
Yes, you'd have access to every interesting object in the sky, both visually and
photographically, but you'd also have a
lot of work ahead of you to get everything operating properly - and, as the
saying goes, time is money.
There are two photos on Vaonis's
website that give me pause. In one, a
young couple sits outside on a deck,
under a bright light, looking down at
a tablet while Stellina sits a few yards
away looking up at the sky. In the
other, people huddle inside a closed
and well-lit tent, presumably looking
at their phone or tablet, while Stellina
sits outside under a star-spangled sky.
Is this the future of stargazing? In a
world where so many people experience
reality (or what they think is reality)
through their handheld screens, and
where the majesty of an unspoiled
night sky continues to fade beyond
reach for most of Earth's inhabitants,
I guess I'll take it if the
alternative is nobody
paying attention to the
universe at all.
■ RICK FIENBERG served
as this magazine's Editor
in Chief from 2001 to 2008
and is now Press Officer of
the American Astronomical
Society.
sk yandtelescope.org * MARCH 2 02 0

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Sky & Telescope - March 2020

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