Vaonis Reviews 

Stellina has changed our family’s entire stargazing experience to make it more interactive, more inclusive for everyone and a lot more fun. The images are amazing. Maybe I shouldn’t say this because old school backyard astronomers will judge, but we live in the cold Rocky Mountains and this winter, there were times we put Stellina outside, initialized then went back inside to scan our targets from climate controlled comfort. Stellina performed well even in temperatures below 20 degrees Fahrenheit and gave us beautiful images of the sky we would not have seen otherwise.

Another great feature, besides all of the pre-loaded sky targets to see, is the ability to manually guide Stellina to the stars and targets we want to find. With coordinates Stellina dials right in and gives us an unreal look at what we want to see.

Also, I bought my Stellina from a private camera and telescope store but when I emailed and called Stellina with questions about operation and warranty, they were absolutely awesome and responsive. One of my favorite hobby purchases ever. Worth every cent. Well done Vaonis. You are an exceptional organization.

I have been into amateur astronomy for many years and have owned a number to telescopes. Not only is Stellina a game changer, it is a world changer. The team at Vaonis are top service professionals and have been incredibly responsive to every inquiry. There is one distinction that everyone should be aware of. Even that largest telescopes in the world would never be able to show you the color and detail that Stallina can provide. These images are created by astrophotography. This is what Stellina does and the Stellina experience is 100 x better than what a traditional astrophotography set up provides. But, there is a group that enjoys an astronomy experience that does not include astrophotography, and to them, the Stellina experience may not be what they are looking for.

I have been fascinated by the stars since I was 10. I am now 76. I have had dozens of telescopes. My largest scope was a 9.25 catadioptric. It weighs over 100 lbs, the tube itself 50 lbs. I gave it to a friend when I could no longer assemble it.
I saw the Vaonis ad and immediately ordered a Stellina. I live in The city and recently sent a photo of the Ring Nebula that I took with the Stellina to my friend who lives deep in the Virginia mountains. He said, “I can’t get this quality with the 9 1/4” that you gave me.
25 lbs. Easy to carry. Setup is a breeze. My neighbors’ porch lights are no problem.
Thank you Vaonis for making an old man happy again.

I had basically given up on using my previous telescope. It was heavy, awkward, and complicated. I’m just too old for that. So when I saw the Stellina on YouTube I was intrigued. And the short review I watched was very positive. The fact that the app did so much of the image processing sold me. The Stellina is so easy to set up that it’s actually fun. And using it is just as easy. So astrophotography is fun again. That’s the best reason for owning one. And when Vaonis comes out with a more advanced product, with perhaps a bit more aperture, I’ll be buying that! Thank you Vaonis!!

I'll admit that my mind was completely blown by the images we got from the Stellina. Such a great way for me to dive back into astronomy and spark some interest in my son. The few support questions I had were answered quickly. Overall I was really, truly impressed!

Ok......Vaonis has nailed it. I have spent years working with various equipment to get images at half the quality I get with Stellina! My wife laughs at me when I’m dancing around exclaiming it only took me 5 minutes or less to set up!

To your engineers....well done. You have designed a masterpiece! And to your managers and leaders...bravo! For creating an atmosphere of such innovative creativity.

I look forward to being delightfully surprised by you in the future!

La meilleure lunette astronomique compacte au monde! The best in the world! J’adore!

I purchased a Stellina from Vaonis to use in my stargazing business. It is simple to use, produces great photos, and is easy to transport. I had an issue with using mine in the cold during the winter in the Colorado Rockies, but Vaonis had excellent customer service resolving the issue.

This is a great product for schools and other community organizations looking to offer stargazing.

The telescope met all my expectations and is great to use in light polluted NYC. Being able to observe deep space from my deck is a lot of fun. Customer service during the pandemic was top notch and I am a very happy owner of a stellina.

Time, weather, and light pollution were my worst enemies, to which Vaonis Stellina could provide a reasonable and decent outcome. I bought this product after a long debate since I am a professional (astrophotography)astronomer. Doing so, I had an enormous freedom in choice and optimisation and thus control over every detail. In other words, translated to a Full automated Vaonis, a lot of AI should be crammed in this instrument. A huge avers, to give away this freedom and control, make sense. I am making a project of this to cram out every inch, point and comma, to test this device to its fullest extent. On top of that I had the disadvantage (but in a way also the advantage) that I had to send my Stellina back.
In a full astrophotography setup, images are better because of the guiding system. For Astrophotography it is mandatory to have an Equatorial mount as one should have a guiding scope, preferably off-axis. Heavy weight and thus limitations in movement of the setup as well as complexity in setup, besides a pretty price card are to be included.
Also, an autofocusing, calibration, tools (Bathinov …) etc are necessary to obtain a maximal quality and make part of the initial setup (time consuming). Dust, humidity …. NOT with Stellina, which is a closed, dedicated system ruling out mutual these incompatibility problems.
Vaonis has an incredible, unseen after service perfectly capable of handling multiple languages by the same person. Follow-up and problem solving is very pro-active. These are really the Rolls-Royce of a whole in one concept! Vaonis really takes every issue personal (in a good way) and is trying to administer problems in a concept vision and not as a Band-Aid on a cycle tube. There is a real ad-hoc forum support as well, to help and treat users. There is an extraordinarily strong community with a healthy mentor attitude.
On top of that Stellina addresses the needs and desires of every user, from newbie to advanced. Clamp on someone in your street, give the Vaonis and within 0.5h the first good images will be on the phone or tablet! The second time that very person would use the Stellina, it will be within 10minutes. As a pro, Stellina houses an incredible plate solving initialisation despites threes, clouds, house walls, heavy light pollution, and no pole star in sight.

Short: Stellina may be expensive, but it is worth every penny!

I hesitated to spend out on yet another piece of equipment for my hobby, but how glad I am that I did. This is simply not "another piece of equipment" but an entirely new and different means of seeing images of the cosmos, but amazingly simple and reliable to use. I had never thought that I would be able to observe distant galaxies and nebulas without hours of processing and complicated equipment, although this is what I wanted to see. With Stellina I check for a clear sky, and I am out there and my trusty Stellina is starting to download photons that have travelled from far distant regions of the universe and I can look at the vast energies of far away galaxies, dust lanes and star formations. I would add that the support and response from Vaonis has been very quick and top class, and I would also like to express my appreciation for all the helpful posts other users put on the Stellina site. Stephen Green

Firstly I am not a photographer, and knew absolutely nothing about how to take pictures with a telescope. But now I can produce superb images with the Stellina telescope - I did not think it possible to produce such amazing images from an inner city light polluted site, and it is so easy to use. Vaonis is a super friendly company, always looking to learn and improve the customer experience

While Stellina is not a cheap solution and as many people have pointed out you could probably get equivalent photos for less by buying a number of items and putting them together (in the traditional telescope manner), where Stellina shines is in its simplicity.

Basically, it does exactly what it is supposed to do, simply and without fuss. The images are very nice (especially if you are prepared to put some effort into the development process).

I dabbled with astrophotography using a standard mount and a DSLR and was always disappointed with the results, this rarely happens with Stellina and when it does it is normally down to the weather! I live in an area where there is a ton of light pollution (bortle 8) but still manage to get images that please me and my friends.

So, in summary, I cannot really fault the device, it does do exactly what is claimed without fail. If you have the money and want to learn about and image the sky it is a great investment.

Stellina changed my life! My husband has a traditional (insanely complicated) telescope setup and I knew I did not want to spend the time and frustration learning to use something like that, even though I really wanted my own setup. The first time I activated Stellina I had my doubts that it would actually work as advertised; it just seemed too good to be true. Five minutes later I was looking at the Hercules Cluster and my mouth was hanging open in utter astonishment. That feeling has never gone away. Watching Stellina open up and start tracking still gives me a thrill, it never gets old. This observation station was well worth every penny, it works exactly as advertised, and the customer support from Vaonis is superb...their company really cares about its users.

I have been exploring the skies since 1990 with traditional equipment. The views through the telescope are pleasing for planetary observation and large luminous objects such as the brightest globular clusters, galaxies and nebulae, but fainter objects are a challenge and truly little color is visible. Five years ago, I tried astrophotography with my DSLR equipment, but could not acquire the skills required, and it was becoming a chore. Then I heard about the smart telescope Stellina. I received mine nine months ago and have been having a ball ever since. I now have taken more color photos with Stellina than I have been able to collect in the previous five years with my other gear. Furthermore, I can observe right from my balcony in a Bortle 8 area during the wintertime in Canada, which I could not do with my other equipment.
Vaonis is an innovative company with a clear mission statement which keeps close to its knitting. Staff keep a close ear to user comments and suggestions. If you are looking for an instrument that will do the arduous and skill-intensive work of aligning, focusing, pointing, tracking, collecting photo frames, stacking them and producing a jpeg image that can be further refined in post treatment, this is it! Stellina can also collect a stacked TIFF image, or you can do your own stacking of TIFF images as well, if you prefer. There is ample opportunity to further develop your images in post-processing. Stellina offers a growing data bank of pre-programmed objects you can choose from or you can insert the coordinates of other objects. It is also possible to create mosaics of objects that do not entirely fit in the Stellina’s field of view, such as the North America Nebula. Vaonis has indicated that an expert mode is underdevelopment that will further support this and other more advanced functions. However, filters are currently not available and Stellina’s performance for planetary photography needs improvement.
The best camera is the one you use. You guessed it, I now use Stellina every chance I get!

I have always been fascinated with astronomy and the images captured over the years by the Hubble telescope. As the technology of digital cameras got better with increased image details as well as the low light gathering capabilities, I started to make my own photos after many minutes of manual polar alignment, hours of snapping photos and then stacking and processing on my computer. Nothing compares to the easy setup of STELLINA. You press start and STELLINA automatically does ALL the work. It aligns itself, tracks the object selected, stacks the photos (even while sleeping) until you press stop. I watch the progress from my comfortable settings (indoors during cold weather). And Voilà, you have a beautiful hi-resolution image to save or share with your friends. I have snapped more photos in the one year of ownership of STELLINA, than I have using my old telescope over forty years. The price is reasonable considering a startup astro-photographer will spend as much for a good tracking telescope, camera and the stacking software. The all-in-one compactness of Stellina also makes carrying the unit to remote viewing areas easy. Also, the Vaonis warranty is superb, the staff is eager and quick to resolve any issues that may come up. Thank you Vaonis for making astronomy fun again.

Love my Stellina, sure there are better astrophoto setups but none as quick and easy. Always responsive when their users ask for new features (sometimes to say it impossible, more usually to say they are working on it)

I’ve had a number of telescopes over the past 20 years and am a keen astrophotographer. The Stellina wins hands down purely from the perspective of the fact that it gets used. Every clear night I get, I set it up and leave it making the observations whilst I go back inside and stay in the warm !
I enjoy the post processing activity so manually select , stack and process the individual frames, but Stellina does a very impressive job of doing all this by itself if you prefer. Many times I’ve spent a few days processing only to end up with an image which is indistinguishable from the one creates automatically.
The light pollution filter lets me do all this from North London , capturing images that are better than I imagined possible.
I still occasionally use my 8” SCT telescope , but always after I’ve set Stellina off and running , and now never for astrophotography.

A great product and a great company !

I have my Stellina scope for one year now. I have used it every clear night since then. That's countless hours of wonder. As I had never done any astrophotography before, I started easy with the JPEG images provided by Stellina, which I touched up in Ligthroom or Google Photos. Soon however I wanted to extract more out of this marvellous instrument and I began to collect the FITS (RAW files) and stack them in DeepSkyStacker before developping them in SiriL and Affinity Photo. This is pure pleasure. I have kept improving my processing skills to produce images of nebulae and galaxies I would never have imagined I could do. What I love about Stellina is how easy it is to set up on my balcony. If the sky is clear, I'll put the scope out (one hour before night, preferably, to let it cool down), and five minutes later, it's up and running. You can select a target from the large built-in catalog (choosing by target type, or by constellation, etc.), or if you can type the J2000 coordinates yourself and point at any point in the sky (to catch an asteroid of a comet, for instance). The "mechanical" part is so easy. Then, you get the image in JPEG, TIFF or FITS format for post processing as much or as little as you want.