Vaonis Hestia ZDNET's key takeaways The Vaonis Hestia is a smartphone telescope device that retails for $300.
The Hestia does well at capturing detailed photos of planets and the stars, and an intuitive app helps guide you.
It is an expensive device that takes some getting used to, and the better smartphone camera you have, the better quality photos you will get. $299 at B&H Photo-Video
Amidst all the doomscrolling, TV binging, and overworking, we've forgotten to look up at the sky every once in a while. I've made it a point to do so when I received a telescope as a birthday present last year, and it's changed the way I look at life.
The telescope I got was a $300 tabletop device, and while it's great for seeing the craters on the moon or even Saturn's faint rings with your own eyes, taking a photo using it is less than ideal. Recently, however, I got a chance to to try out Vaonis' Hestia smartphone telescope -- a device designed to solve this very problem.
The Hestia isn't really a telescope at all, but it aligns your smartphone camera with its ocular to collect and focus the light directly into your smartphone's camera sensor. A six-lens optical design featuring a 30mm objective and 25x magnification allows you to see the planets and stars through the lens of your smartphone (you can check out the list of compatible phones on the company's website), making the sky accessible to anyone.
Setting it up is easy enough, as it weighs less than two pounds and attaches easily to a tripod. It works with any smartphone -- just align your phone's main camera onto the Hesita and secure it in place. What really makes the sky come alive is Hestia's free app, Gravity.
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This well-designed app shows you a map of the sky, allowing you to pick a planet or a star cluster, and uses your phone's GPS to guide you where to aim the device so you can capture a photo. There are different camera "modes" you can choose from, like scenery, sun, moon, deep sky, and planet.
I had already dabbled in night sky photography with my tabletop telescope, so I was looking forward to pitting the Hestia against the results I got from a regular telescope and my iPhone 16.
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