The Unistellar Odyssey smart telescope made me question what stargazing means

Enlarge / The Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro and the Unistellar Odyssey Pro. (credit: Tim Stevens)

It's been 300 years since Galileo and Isaac Newton started fiddling around with lenses and parabolic mirrors to get a better look at the heavens. But if you look at many of the best amateur telescopes today, you'd be forgiven for thinking they haven't progressed much since.

Though components have certainly improved, the basic combination of mirrors and lenses is more or less the same. Even the most advanced "smart" mounts that hold them rely on technology that hasn't progressed in 30 years.

Compared to the radical reinvention that even the humble telephone has received, it's sad that telescope tech has largely been left behind. But that is finally changing. Companies like Unistellar and Vaonis are pioneering a new generation of scopes that throw classic astronomy norms and concepts out the window in favor of a seamless setup and remarkable image quality.