 This video is sponsored by professional photographers of America. Join a community of over 33,000 photographers and find equipment, insurance, education, and business tools made specifically for photographers like you. This is the Veyonus Vespera observation station, and this is an asked photography kit that I put together to do everything the Vespera does, but I put it together using various spare parts I already had around. Despite their very different looks, these two kits are incredibly similar on paper. They use the same camera sensor, the same optics, identical specs there, the ability to automate most imaging tasks, including finding deep sky objects and focusing on them. They also both happen to cost $2,500 US when bought new today. And in this video, I've put them head to head on the same night, and I'm going to compare what it's like actually using these two setups under the stars, and then also see if there's any difference in the final images that we can create with them. Hello, my name is Nico, and this channel is all about asked photography. One trend in asked photography is always more automation. And by automation, I mean the system itself takes over many of the tasks that we once did manually, like figuring out where to point the telescope or focusing the telescope, all these kinds of little things that we used to do with our hands. And this Vespera is on the cutting edge of automation. Veyonus has really created a very sleek system for taking images of the night sky. And of course that won't be for everyone, but as a bit of a tech head gadget freak kind of person myself, I had a blast playing with it. But before I jump into a full review, let me start with just a couple disclosures. This Veyonus Vespera and all the accessories were sent to me by Veyonus for the purpose of making a video review, but they have no input into what I will say in the video, no money has exchanged hands, and when I'm finished reviewing it, I'll be sending this back to them. In my spare parts kit, the only thing I didn't purchase myself is the Star Adventurer GTI mount, which is still on extended loan from Skywatcher USA. So thank you to them. So why am I making this video? Well, Veyonus approached me asking if I wanted to review the Vespera. I looked into it and I looked at the spec sheet and I realized, huh, you know what, I have everything I need to make my own Vespera of sorts by putting together various parts I had lying around or I could cannibalize from other rigs. And then when I totaled what all of that would cost, all these parts to buy new, it came to $2,500, which is exactly what Veyonus is selling the Vespera for. So now I was even more intrigued because you'd think, okay, these two kits have the same sensor, the same kind of optics. They're gonna probably take similar photos and the overall price is the same. So why would you go for this one or this one? And basically what are the advantages and disadvantages of going with something like this, the super sleek Vespera versus my more Frankenstein's monster of a setup over here? Well, that's the main thing I'm gonna explore in this video and of course I've had the chance to take them out under the stars and do a little bit of head to head matchup so we'll compare the images coming from these kits. I took pictures of the Horsehead Nebula at the same time under the exact same sky. So let's first take a look at the Vespera and the reason Veyonus calls this the Vespera observation station is that it's combined a telescope, a motorized mount, a camera, an autofocuser, a computer, and a Wi-Fi antenna all into one streamlined package. There's literally just one button on this to turn it off and on and then after that you have to control it through the app. So you do need an Android or iOS device to use this. You don't need cell service, that's important because often when I'm out somewhere dark I might not have good cell service. This station does create its own Wi-Fi network that you connect to, the Vespera network. And then from there setting it up is very incredibly easy and seamless. From taking it out of the box, not knowing anything about it, to start taking photos, my first object was the Dumbbell Nebula literally took about 10 minutes and was incredibly low friction. I think anyone could start on astrophotography with this device. I didn't question what was happening at any point. I enjoyed seeing it work and make little noises and it was telling me what it was doing on screen and also telling me fun facts about space. This setup on the other hand, the spare parts build here took me well over an hour to get going and even then it wasn't really working to its full potential. And keep in mind, I'm an experienced astrophotographer but this was a new rig so there's always plenty to go wrong with a new rig. One of the things that did go wrong was the ASIR Plus was new to me. I'd been putting off learning it even though I've had it for a while. And so it took me over an hour, partly because I had major connection issues when trying to control the ASIR from my Android smartphone. Basically it just kept creating that Wi-Fi network, allowing me to connect and then disconnecting. The Wi-Fi network would disappear even though I was standing right next to it. And this persisted even though I restarted it a few times. But let me make clear, I think this was some kind of user error probably. I'm just, I'm not trying to diss the ASIR. I know it's a very popular device but more of what I'm trying to point out here is that putting together a kit like this one from all these various parts that you have to know how to use, that's gonna require a lot more troubleshooting and finessing before you can make it into a stable imaging system. So your first night, your first two nights, maybe even your first several nights out, you can expect to have to fine tune this and really get to grips with how everything here works together. And for people like me that's part of the fun of astrophotography. But I can totally see someone else would rather just get on with it and have a more turnkey system like this one. That's what this Vespera really sort of excels at. And so before I even got this one working, I had already taken nice pictures of the dumbbell nebula and the Cygnus wall with the Vespera. Speaking of that Cygnus wall picture for this shot, I tried no filter and then I tried Vespera's proprietary click-in filter add-ons. I tried their dual band, narrow band filter. And I gotta say, they made this so easy to install a filter. You just click here to unclick the empty filter cell, you click back in a filter, it automatically recognize it's been installed and changes the settings however it needs to. I've never found an easier way to change out filters than what they've done here. I should also point out while we're looking at the front of the Vespera that Veonis did send me this review unit out with the hygrometer, which is a tiny little $100 add-on you screw in right here. And what that does is it measures the water vapor in the air so that the system knows how to keep the telescope and the filters free from due. And I don't know without this add-on if we might've had problems with due but I probably would get it for my environment out here. Let me take a moment here to speak about this video's sponsor which is PPA, Professional Photographers of America. I've been a member for a few months now and I'm very happy with what they offer as part of a membership. For a low monthly price, you receive a bunch of unique benefits. I'm just going to highlight some of the ones that I think are most important to me as primarily an astrophotographer. Well, we all know that astrophotography gear can get very expensive. I have $5,000 worth of gear right here in front of me. And so to tell you the truth, all my photography and astrophotography is probably one of my biggest investments. It's worth definitely more than my car. So I've often thought that I'd really like to ensure my equipment and have insurance, you know, just like I have for my house and my car. Well, PPA makes that super easy because membership includes photography equipment insurance. And it's a very nice plan where if something breaks and you need full replacement, it's a $350 flat deductible or if you can get your equipment repaired, then it's just a $50 flat deductible. And that's a much better deal than what I get with my renters insurance. I did check out the terms. And so this equipment assurance alone makes it worth it for me, but they also offer data recovery services. That could be a huge deal if you're doing sort of a one of a kind event. And then lastly, PPA is very active in terms of photography, education and training. And I know that many of my viewers practice other forms of photography outside of Astro. And I think this is a great group to get involved with to up your game in many different areas of photography. So if that sounds intriguing to you, follow the link in the video description for a special discount on your membership. Now let's go through some of the pros and the cons of using the Vespera versus my spare parts build. Okay, starting with ease of use and as you imagine, the Vespera is very easy to use. I'm gonna get two thumbs up there. The spare parts rig, I was sort of torn between a pro and a con. I would say that for a beginner, there's just too many things to learn and too many things to go wrong to call it easy to use. So I'm gonna give it a thumbs down for ease of use. But keep in mind with that that if you practice a few times, maybe five times, it can get quite easy to use. It's really just a matter of putting in the time. But with the Vespera, there's really no downtime. You immediately understand how to use it. Cause there's just really nothing to learn. It does everything pretty much automatically. In terms of weight, the whole Veyonus Vespera with all the optional filters in its backpack, the backpack you can buy for it weighs 14 pounds. So really very lightweight. The spare parts rig is just a bit over 20 pounds. And that includes the counterweight that comes with the Star Adventure GTI. So I'd say both are lightweight but the Vespera is incredibly lightweight. It's just 14 pounds total. And in terms of packability, the Veyonus Vespera, everything fits into a backpack that you can buy optionally for it. It's all very compact and yeah, really, really packable. The spare parts rig, you could pack it all up. I think it'd be hard to sort of fit everything in in a nice way all assembled like it is there. So even though you could pack all of it into a backpack, I think you would want to take out off all the cables and then reassemble those. So it's not quite as easy to pack and unpack. Okay, and then in terms of upgradeability, the Veyonus Vespera does have a few accessories you can buy. There's a solar filter and narrowband filter and a light pollution filter. And then there's the hygrometer, which is for controlling the dew heater. And those are really the only upgrades at the moment. They may come out with more, but based on how the Vespera is designed, you sort of have to go with upgrades that the Veyonus may provide. While the spare parts rig, you could really change out any part of this. You could change out the mount. You could change out the optics. You could change out the camera. You could add a guide scope, which we'll talk about. So it's completely upgradeable. You can do anything you want with it. In terms of cost, I'm giving these both moderate thumbs down. I mean, in terms of what they do, they're fairly priced. $2,500 is just sort of what you can expect if you want this fully automatic system with autofocus and go-to and all that. But I think there are much less expensive ways to get into astrophotography that will give you just as good, if not better results. So I'm a big advocate for starting with a DSLR and lens. And if you do that from a dark sky with a nice mount, you can get amazing results that way. So if you're not so concerned with all the auto features, all the automated features, I think you can get a much less expensive rig going because you're not paying for things like an autofocuser or a mount that has go-to and a computer that can do plate solving and all of these different features. In terms of flexibility, I guess this is sort of similar to upgradeability, but it's related in the sense that with the spare parts rig, I could upgrade something, like upgrade to a mono camera with a narrowband filter and that would very much change the nature of the rig. If something's going wrong, I can also quickly change out a single part and get it working again. So it's flexible. Well, with the Veonis Vespera, if something did go wrong with it, I wouldn't have any idea how to fix it because it's basically a black box of a machine. You don't open it up because there's no visible screws or anything. It's sort of like an iPhone or something. So in terms of flexibility, it's not the best. And then in terms of the results, I think both did pretty well. I'm gonna show those right now and you can decide for yourself, of course, but I would give them both a thumbs up. So let's move over to Pix Insight here and we can look at some of the results. Now, since these were using the exact same optics, a 200 millimeter focal length lens at F4 with the same chip and IMX462 by Sony, the single frames look remarkably similar. You can see the composition is slightly different in terms of the rotation. That wasn't something I really had much control over but the horse head is centered on both. You can see spot sizes of stars are similar, the amount of detail, the amount of noise, all of this is very similar in a single frame. Now where it got a little bit more interesting is in the full integration of about 70 minutes on each. So here is the full integration of my spear parts kit. And now let's look at that compared to the full integration with the Vespera. And there are some minor color differences. I don't know what to account for that but this one just looks like a little bit more of a gent on the Vespera but I don't know why exactly. The main thing though that I've, I notice if we zoom in on both and if we sort of look at, yes, this area right here, this is what I call walking noise but see how on the Vespera, the walking noise is curved. Well, on my kit, the walking noise is very much in these straight diagonal lines which we are very common with an equatorial mount that isn't auto guided or that isn't dithered between auto guided exposures. I don't know if I really have a preference between these two examples of walking noise but it is interesting how with the alt as mount we get the curved and with the equatorial mount we get the straight walking noise. And this plays out in the rejection patterns as well. You can see because this is an alt as mount you get all of this field rotation and that also means that over time you lose more and more of the frame. So if we went out to two hours or three hours we would start losing even more of the overall frame due to that field rotation. Well, that's not true with a equatorial mount although if your polar alignment isn't very good you'll get worse and worse walking noise like we see here. Now to go back to our chart and I was talking about upgradability and flexibility with the spare parts rig. If we were to add on a cheap guide scope and auto guiding camera we could really minimize this walking noise and it would basically eliminate it because if you auto guide your exposures and then you dither occasionally between sub exposures you can break up this noise pattern that's created and get a very clean result. Well with the Vespera I haven't seen anything about dithering it should be possible for them to dither even without auto guiding just by because it's controlling the pointing it can do plate solving and all that so I could see in a future upgrade maybe they could introduce that in the software. Okay, a little bit of an editor's update here while I've been working on this video Veonis released this mosaic or panorama mode on both the Vespera and the Stelina and when I was reading through this article I was definitely interested in trying it but then I got down to this paragraph and it says that the way this mosaic mode works is actually through the dithering effect and they specifically call out that this is going to have an impact on inherent defects of the sensor noise and hot pixels. So I really wanna try this but at the same time I need to get this video out so for now we'll just have to trust that this does really work and it would definitely even the score a bit I think between my spare parts rig and the Veonis Vespera because with my spare parts rig I would have to add on a guide scope and guide camera in order to dither between exposures while with the Veonis telescope you can do it through this mosaic mode. Now again, I haven't tried this so I don't know how easy it is or if there's any drawbacks but it seems like it would just be the way to go with this telescope. So very exciting news if you already own this telescope and if you've tried it let me know in the comments and let everyone know how it works but in any case I think you can see that with either of these final results you could process them to sort of minimize this noise in the dark areas and get a very nice end result. I don't see a major difference between these two in terms of signal to noise ratio or star size or anything like that so I think you'd be quite happy using either setup. So I think that's it for this one. I'd be happy to answer any questions in the comments as always and until next time this is Nico Carver, Nebula Photos, Clear Skies.