Optics/Sensor
The Vaonis Vespera II uses a 50mm f/5 quadruplet (Petzval) optical configuration with a 250mm focal length (in practice, mine measures about 250.3mm).
A Petzval or quad consists of an ED doublet refractor at the front with a reducer/corrector doublet lens at the back; the simplest way to think of it is just that it’s got a built-in reducer-flattener. The Petzval configuration of the Vespera means that, unlike many competing “smart telescopes,” it delivers a field that is consistently flat and sharp across a fairly wide area.
However, it is not consistently illuminated. The edges of the field of view have quite a bit of vignetting and thus need to be cropped. Even with background extraction or flat frames applied in your image processing, there’s simply less light reaching the corners/edges of the sensor. Thus, there is a lot of noise that needs to be cropped out, at least at the corners where the problem is most severe.
For its camera, the Vespera II uses the Sony IMX585 sensor, a 3840 x 2160 camera with 2.9-micron pixels. This produces 2.39 arcsec per pixel sampling with Vespera’s optics, which is about ideal considering the resolution limit of a 50mm telescope is around 2.32 arcseconds.
This sensor is uncooled. You can definitely tell that performance is better on colder nights. During the summer, temperatures remained above 80 degrees Fahrenheit for the whole night at my house, and the data from those evenings has noise equivalent to images with half the exposure time on a cooler night. Thankfully, there is some preprocessing when you use Vespera that takes care of the worst fixed-pattern noise and gradients.
Ironically, due to the smaller pixels than most of its competitors, Vespera II (and the Pro) takes a lot longer to build up a bright image when you’re viewing the image stacking live on your phone, since smaller pixels mean less light reaches each one individually. Personally I don’t care to view the live stacks—waiting to view the post-processed image in the morning is more rewarding and lets me look at the night sky with my eyeballs and a conventional telescope in the meantime anyway.
The native field of view of Vespera II is, on paper, about 2.5 x 1.4 degrees. In practice, if you just shoot a normal image and don’t utilize mosaic mode, you usually have to crop it to about 2.1 x 1.2 degrees or so to remove the vignetting, noise, and odd stars around the corners. Using the Vespera’s mosaic mode is supposed to be a workaround for the vignetting/noise at the edges of the field—more on that feature later.
Power & Connection
Compared to a typical telescope mount for imaging, the power draw of Vespera is ludicrous, mostly because of the fact that the WiFi network is constantly running at pretty high power.
I can connect to the scope with my phone from around 100 meters away on the other side of my house, fence, and multiple vehicles. This is nice and all, but turning down the signal strength by half would allow the thing to actually image for a whole night without external power.
Vespera’s WiFi network makes up the vast majority of its roughly 12-watt power draw, which runs out its internal battery in about 4 hours. If you switch between a bunch of different targets, you’ll get closer to 3 hours.
As such, you pretty much have to get an external battery with a USB port to use Vespera. I opted to buy an EcoFlow River 3 to use with the scope at the Okie-Tex Star Party, and I charge it off a solar panel to save money. The Vespera drains that battery by about ⅓ in a single night via a direct USB-C connection.
Of course, given the positioning of the power cable port on the side of Vespera, cord wrap is also an issue; the scope will unwind itself from its tripod if the cord gets tangled as well, so I had to buy a 10-foot cable to image for more than 1 night in a row without making adjustments.
Mount
The base Vespera II kit includes the Vespera unit itself and nothing more. You can attach the scope to any photo tripod with a ⅜” stud, but the one Vaonis sells is quite sturdy, and there’s really no need to elevate the scope high above the ground and induce unnecessary additional vibrations. I found absolutely no advantages in using it on my Bogen 3011 versus the provided Vaonis tripod.
Vespera uses an alt-azimuth mount to point at and track objects in the sky, much like its competitors, with all-metal gears and has incredible tracking precision.
Stars are as sharp as they can be given the nature of its optics and sensor. As explained in my article, however, there are a lot of reasons why an equatorial mount is ideal for astrophotography as opposed to an alt-azimuth mount. The biggest reason is field rotation, which Vespera attempts to solve in some interesting ways (albeit not fully).
Using an alt-azimuth mount and not cropping the frame also means that with Vespera’s default framing applied, your target starts out at a different rotation angle every night unless you start imaging it as soon as it gets high/low enough to start imaging. However, using Vespera’s mosaic/multi-night mode does get around this.
Imaging & CovalENS
To find and stay pointed at objects you’d like to image, Vespera uses plate solving both to initially aim and for ongoing tracking corrections.
After a very quick initialization (a single random image of the sky above the horizon, then a second one after the rough slew), the telescope knows its orientation to within a few arcminutes. It then slews to the target, takes another plate-solve, centers the target, autofocuses, and begins imaging. During the session, Vespera periodically re-plate-solves or uses image registration to make tiny corrections, mostly to compensate for field rotation, which is the elephant in the room with any alt-azimuth mount when you’re trying to do long exposures.
Field rotation causes the target you’re pointed at to spin as the night goes on relative to the framing of your camera sensor. On its own, this is not really a huge issue with exposures less than a minute long, since individual frames need to be aligned for stacking anyhow, and the rotation doesn’t trail stars over such a short period.
Other smart scopes like the ZWO SeeStar just crop the frame as it spins. Vespera, however, uses software called “CovalENS” to create a wider field than the sensor itself produces as well as attempt to compensate for this issue. Instead of holding the telescope’s pointing fixed on the object’s center, the telescope deliberately introduces small, controlled offsets between every exposure—typically a diagonal “wobble” that is synchronized with the calculated field-rotation rate for that particular target and time.
Each 10-second frame is therefore taken with the field slightly shifted in a pattern that counteracts the rotation. The live stacking engine then registers and stitches all these slightly overlapping subs into a seamless, larger composite image. Since true dithering is built-in, hot pixels, walking noise, and fixed-pattern noise are dramatically suppressed by Vespera’s onboard processing, without any user intervention. You can increase exposure time per frame to up to 30 seconds, but this presents some issues.
Because Vespera is constantly making these small movements, it has short breaks between frames and has to reject a higher percentage of frames than a fixed-pointing scope would. In practice the rejection rate is still very low on 10s frames (usually 2–5% on a decent night), but Vespera also has to make more time-consuming corrections and discard more frames with longer subs; on 20-second exposures you can lose up to half your imaging time to these maneuvers. It just doesn’t make sense to go longer than 20 seconds.
Additionally, field rotation is still present even with CovalENS, so stars at the edges of the frame still get some trailing with longer exposures. The default 10-second exposures Vespera takes are sharp all the way to the edge, but the same is not true of longer exposures. 15 seconds is still fine, but 20 seconds is inconsistent; the longer you go, the fewer usable frames you get and the more likely you are to have some trailing/streaking of stars near the edges of the frame.
Another feature CovalENS is supposed to enable is mosaics. When you switch Vespera to its dedicated CovalENS Mosaic (Panorama) Mode, you define a larger rectangular or custom area in the Singularity app, and the scope executes a planned grid of these micro-dithered panels, stitching everything live into a single ultra-wide image (up to ~4.8° × 2.7° at 24 megapixels on Vespera II).
However, you cannot program in mosaics with the “plan my night” feature for whatever reason, which makes using it somewhat cumbersome, since the scope will only move on to another target when you command it to do so rather than automatically moving on with the “plan my night” feature. I don’t know why this is, but it’s somewhat disappointing. I imaged sections of the Veil Nebula at a time, then combined them with a few hours of mosaic mode data (currently the total is about 22 hours):
However, out of impatience I ended up making this Heart Nebula mosaic entirely without the use of the mosaic mode, simply by stitching together overlapping images in Siril:
It’s also worth noting that due to the way CovalENS works, you cannot ever use Vespera II to image targets higher than 80 degrees in the sky, which is really irritating if you have obstructions like trees. It also won’t let you aim below 20 degrees, which has prevented me from imaging NGC 55 to the south.
How I Set Up and Use Vespera II with the Singularity App
Vespera II is delightfully easy to set up and operate for a night of imaging. All you need to do is assemble your tripod, level it, attach the telescope, plug in external power, and hit the button on the side of the unit to turn it on.
You then connect your phone/tablet to its WiFi network and open the Singularity app. Singularity will let you initialize the scope and take manual control, or you can use the “plan my night” feature to sequence your targets.
Using the “plan my night” feature automatically schedules Vespera to initialize and point at targets on its own, so I can program in the next evening right after sunrise each day. The “plan my night” mode lets you sequence as many objects as you want (with a 5-minute minimum) and will automatically image your targets for the duration specified, then output a stacked TIF, which you can edit later on a computer, as well as a “live stack” JPEG image with basic post-processing applied.
As an alternative to using “Plan my night” and stacking multiple images yourself, Singularity has a “multi-night” mode that will let you image up to 5 objects at a time and stack them over multiple nights, with the ability to use mosaic mode as well. However, you cannot have Vespera automatically move on to the next target when doing this. It would be nice if the “plan my night” and “multi-night observation” + mosaic modes could all be used at once.
By default, Vespera has a fairly large catalog, but you can manually add targets, as well as create “custom” versions of existing ones with the exposure time altered (by default it is 10 seconds) as well as adjustments to the gain and exact framing.
Unfortunately, Singularity doesn’t have a planetarium-style feature to show you where things actually are in the sky—just graphs showing when things are available to image—so if you have obstructions like trees, mountains, or buildings, you need to use another app like SkySafari to estimate what is possible for you to image. Vespera will keep making an effort every 5 minutes if the target is obstructed by clouds or terrain, but it will not move on to the next target in “plan my night” mode on its own until it is time to do so.
By default, Vespera “live stacks” images that can be exported as simple JPEGs. However, the onboard processing is really not that good, and JPEGs are a highly lossy and compressed file format. You will get much better images if you export the high-quality stacked TIF images to a computer and process them with software like PixInsight or Siril. For most of my processing, I use Siril with the GraXpert and SETI Cosmic Clarity plugins, all free to download. You can export individual RAW frames as well with Vespera, but this can be difficult to stack yourself and takes a lot of RAM/storage space, and there’s no loss of quality by taking the already-stacked TIFs and processing those.
To extract the stacked TIF images from Vespera, you can either save them to your device from the Singularity app and then upload them to the cloud to put onto your PC, or you can connect your computer to Vespera’s WiFi network and enter in ftp://10.0.0.1, which will bring you to a view of the Vespera hard drive, and then you can just copy-paste directly to your computer’s storage.
After exporting the TIFs, I usually combine several nights’ worth of data by stacking them within Siril. Post-processing is a pretty simple sequence of background extraction → cropping → denoising → sharpening → more denoising → stretching → RGB aligning → color balancing. This takes about 15 minutes now that I have a routine nailed down, and most of that is because my PC is somewhat slow and outdated, so denoise/sharpening takes a while.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Vespera II vs a Traditional Astrophotography Rig
Advantages of Vespera II over a traditional rig
- Setup-to-imaging time is ~7 minutes instead of 60–90 minutes. No polar alignment, no cable management, no guide camera, no meridian flips, no balancing, no focusing woes.
- It is genuinely portable: the whole system (telescope + tripod + filters + backpack) weighs less than an equatorial mount head alone.
- Zero setup/maintenance frustration. No dew heaters to forget, no USB cables to flake out, no filter wheel to jam, and no loose screws to worry about.
- It’s fun. I actually look forward to imaging nights instead of dreading them. I can go and do something else, not necessarily even observing, and know that Vespera is guaranteed to reliably output data without any intervention.
- The built-in mosaic mode is vastly easier to use than stitching frames together yourself and can even be used for live stacking.
Disadvantages of Vespera II vs a traditional rig
- Field rotation and alt-az mount limitations mean you are effectively capped at ~15-20 s exposures per frame for perfectly round stars corner-to-corner. A traditional equatorially mounted rig with guiding can run 5-minute subs easily. This matters a lot on really faint targets.
- Narrowband imaging is possible with the Vaonis dual-band filter or third-party options, but you’re still limited to short subs; you can’t touch what a cooled mono camera + LRGB+Ha/OIII/SII can do on faint objects, and light pollution puts a ceiling on performance.
- The sensor is uncooled, so higher temperatures mean more noise, and on the whole it is just a lot noisier than a cooled sensor, which is a problem when you’re limited to extremely short exposures.
In practice, despite its shortcomings, the Vespera II wins on every metric that matters to me and to many people interested in astrophotography.
Sure, it’s not going to work on faint targets as easily—but how often are you going to set up your astrophotography rig when it takes half an hour to do so, especially if you’re unsure about the weather? One night it suddenly hailed so hard at the Okie-Tex Star Party that entire telescopes were destroyed, but my little Vespera was safe inside its backpack—ready to image again, in the mud, when it unexpectedly cleared up at 3:30 AM, when I took some of the data for this 12-hour image of the Fireworks Galaxy:
Try that with a traditional setup! Unless you have a permanent, automated observatory, Vespera will get you imaging twice or even ten times as much as a traditional rig, which is the difference between imaging one or two targets per season and, well, fifty in my case.
How an Equatorial Wedge Would Transform the Vespera II
If one were able to put the Vespera II on a properly polar-aligned equatorial wedge, which the competing (but inferior) ZWO SeeStar now has the capability of, literally every limitation of the current Vespera system disappears:
- No field rotation → stars would stay round to the very corners, even with exposures longer than the current limitation of 30 seconds.
- Mosaic mode, and imaging with longer subframes, becomes vastly more efficient because panels no longer need micro-dithering offsets: zero wasted data.
- Multi-night imaging projects would keep identical framing and rotation forever.
- Scientific observations like photometry for variable stars or exoplanets would be possible to conduct, and time lapses of moving objects like comets and asteroids would be much easier.
In short, a wedge would turn the Vespera II from “the best smart telescope” into something that genuinely competes with traditional cooled-camera rigs on an order of magnitude more expensive and complicated. I would buy one instantly if Vaonis were ever to release such a product. Even just software capability to use one with a DIY or third-party wedge would be wonderful.
Reliability & Software Update Issues (as of December 2025)
Vaonis pushes embedded updates to Vespera units every few months, which is both a blessing and a curse. The 2025 software updates (February, April, July, October, and November) have added lots of bug fixes and improved performance somewhat, but almost every single update has broken something for a subset of users. There is also no way to opt out of updates; the update button is prominent on the main menu screen and starts the irreversible process if you tap it accidentally.
The biggest issue that can come from these updates seems to be Vespera’s software being corrupted or otherwise incorrectly installed—sometimes after an update the scope is unable to connect to your device and simply sits with the power light flashing. Vaonis’ recommended fix is to simply wait for the battery to drain and then try restarting it after charging, but something like ⅓ of users I am aware of have had to send the scope back to France for repairs when this doesn’t fix the problem. Since there is no way to connect to Vespera via the built-in USB-C port, the only way to flash new firmware in the event of a catastrophe like this is for Vaonis’ technicians to open up the telescope and reprogram the main board.
Since the latest update in November 2025, I have had the scope sometimes shut down unexpectedly during a pre-planned imaging session, usually while I am asleep and thus wasting hours of perfectly clear skies. This is not quite what I would expect from a finished product. I am hoping the next update fixes this.
Should I buy a Used Vaonis Vespera II?
A pre-owned Vespera II is an excellent deal. They regularly sell for $1,200–$1,500 in like-new condition on Cloudy Nights, eBay, Facebook groups, as well as from High Point Scientific and other retailers.
Vaonis’ warranty is 2 years and transferable. I’d happily buy a used one tomorrow.
I would not recommend a used Vespera I, however, due to the inferior software/hardware performance and likely eventual deprecation of support.
Vaonis Vespera II Kit Accessories
Besides the tripod (practically mandatory) for Vespera, Vaonis sells three filters for it: a white-light solar filter, a broadband (CLS) filter, and a dual-band filter. These simply pop onto the front of the scope with a magnet.
You can certainly buy more expensive and exotic nebula filters that are better than the ones Vaonis sells, but there are diminishing returns as you spend more, and you’ll need to DIY the housing for them to attach to the scope (fairly easy with a 3D printer).
I would not bother with the Vespera solar filter—this scope is not optimized for Solar System targets at all, and your smartphone up to the eyepiece of virtually any beginner telescope with a solar filter is going to produce better photos.
The broadband filter and dual-band filter, however, are practically mandatory. You can shoot things unfiltered, but if you live near any kind of light pollution whatsoever (even Bortle 3 or 4) and/or the Moon is up, you will have annoying gradients, a weaker signal, and lots of noise.
The dual-band filter is ideal for emission nebulae, planetary nebulae, and supernova remnants—especially under very bright skies—while the broadband filter is best on galaxies and star clusters. You will need dark skies or extremely long exposure times to get good images of reflection nebulae; the broadband filter dims them quite a bit, and shooting unfiltered will just be noisy, as mentioned. Under a dark sky, however, you should always shoot unfiltered for better color balance and signal.
My Aftermarket/Third-Party Accessory Recommendations
Vespera II’s standard USB-C charger will work with almost any decent lithium battery power supply that can supply at least 12 watts of power, but I would recommend one of the EcoFlow River units if you are planning on taking the scope anywhere for multiple nights in a row. Besides that and a long USB-C cable, there isn’t much to add to Vespera besides the accessories Vaonis themselves sell.
If you’re feeling adventurous, you can buy an aftermarket quad-band, CLS, dual-band, etc. filter and 3D-print your own housing to use it with Vespera, or make your own dew shield, but strictly speaking, these are not necessary to get good performance out of the telescope.
How the Vaonis Vespera II Compares to Other Smart Telescopes
- Vaonis Vespera Pro—The Pro is worse than the Vespera II in every way; I don’t get why Vaonis even sells it. The Pro’s sensor is narrower and has pixels too small/oversampled to be useful, and the smaller pixels mean more noise and longer integration times.
- ZWO SeeStar S50 – Functionally the SeeStar sounds a lot like the Vespera II, with the same 50mm f/5 optics. However, the Vespera has a vastly superior sensor, can run autonomously, and mechanically is far better constructed with proper metal gears and stepper motors for the drive system. The Vespera II is to the SeeStar what a Porsche is to a Miata.
- Unistellar eVscope—Misleading marketing aside, the eVscope’s poor sensor, lack of a flat/coma-corrected field, etc., make it hardly comparable to Vespera’s image quality.
What’s best to image with Vespera II?
Vespera II is mostly optimized for nebulae, which are the main things I like to image. Anything from planetaries like the Helix, to the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, to faint supernova remnants like the Veil is possible even from a light-polluted city.
Most galaxies are pretty small and faint, but you can do bigger ones with Vespera II and capture detail like spiral arms. I imaged the supernova in NGC 7331, SN2025rbs, back in July 2025.
Pushing the exposure time to just under 20 hours allowed me to get IC 342 from my backyard with the broadband filter.
Even from a fairly light-polluted location, however, you can push Vespera II to its limits and get some surprisingly good images of dark nebulae and reflection nebulae, such as the Cocoon and M78, if you’re patient and have a good eye for post-processing.
