Using your smartphone with the Vaonis Hestia

Like Vaonis’s Vespera smart telescopes, the Hestia connects to your smartphone, but it’s an altogether different approach

Instead of using a telescope with integrated sensor to take images, the Vaonis Hestia relies on the smartphone’s camera. The product itself has built-in optics to provide 25x magnification.

The way it works is akin to using your smartphone to take images through a regular telescope’s eyepiece.

Known as afocal photography, that technique involves lining up a smartphone’s camera perfectly with an eyepiece – and often presents challenges to get the alignment right, even with a smartphone-to-telescope adaptor.

Using the Hestia is similar, but instead of a clamp, two magnetic brackets cradle your smartphone.

We found they worked well, but it was still necessary to nudge them into place so that the camera lens sat directly across the ocular. 

Once in place, the Gravity app helped us locate and compose various targets, from the Moon and Sun (using the supplied solar filter) to the 40 or so star clusters and bright deep-sky objects in its internal catalogue.

To image deep-sky objects, we noted one of the latest smartphones – such as an iPhone 13, Galaxy S22 Ultra or Pixel 5 and newer – is required. 

Setting up

Getting the Hestia focused is best done in daylight so you can use a distant tree or chimney pot to focus on, but we discovered we had to be very careful to extract the smartphone afterwards without moving the magnetic brackets.

The Hestia has a 3/8-inch tripod thread on its undercarriage, so it can be attached to any full-size photographic tripod.

Vaonis does provide a tripod and a pan-and-tilt head in the Ultimate pack, but we found early on that the head’s lever interfered with the tripod and made positioning the Hestia difficult.

How the Vaonis Hestia performs

The Vaonis Hestia has no automatic Go-To function and lacks a motorised mount, so it can’t track objects.

That could soon change, but for now it’s a manual affair via the Gravity app, which gives various observing options: scenery, Sun, eclipse, Moon, deep-sky and planet (the eclipse mode is a clue to this product’s original intended market, observers of North America’s total eclipse in April 2024).

The most ambitious is deep-sky mode, which stacks together multiple long exposures to build an image.

Gravity used our smartphone’s GPS and its in-built plate solving to provide instructions to locate these objects. On a sturdier tripod this process worked well.

Once deep-sky objects were located, the shutter button initiated 30 exposures and stacked the image in about a minute.

It impressed with basic but clear images of the Hercules Cluster, M13, and the Ring Nebula, M57, in light-polluted conditions.

While the app’s deep-sky catalogue is limited, if you can aim the Hestia manually, you can image any object. 

With the solar filter attached, we turned to imaging the Sun. Once located, we noted that the image was marred with glare, despite the filter.

Sunspots were visible, but the overall image was pale and lacking in both colour and contrast. 

Across its various modes, focusing was hit and miss.

The Gravity app has an electronic focusing slider that can be used while the Hestia is pointed at an object, but we didn’t find it overly effective.

Cue Gravity’s focus assistant wizard, which took a total of 21 separate frames at different focus points. We could then scan through these to choose the sharpest.

It was a quick process for the Sun and Moon, but took several minutes for deep-sky objects. 

The Vaonis Hestia does not produce super-sharp images, but its results are fine for sharing on social media and rewarding for new astrophotographers who want to maximise their smartphone’s capabilities.

The first smartphone-based telescope is enjoyable to use, yet we felt that improvements to the model are inevitable. We’re excited to see what the Vaonis Hestia becomes.

Vaonis Hestia’s Moon mode

Lunar images are the Hestia’s speciality.

Easy to find in the night sky and not requiring the use of any filters, it’s an object that easily fits into the Hestia’s 1.8° field of view, allowing us to capture some lovely images across several sessions.

Using the Gravity app’s Moon mode also provided handy information on the Moon’s phase, rise and set times for our location.

After positioning our smartphone on the Hestia using the magnetic brackets, we selected Moon mode.

The focus within the app was initially set at 50%, but we adjusted it to 0% and then used the manual focus ring to achieve a rough initial focus.

While it provided a good starting point, the action of rotating the focus ring could introduce vibrations. 

However, focus could then be further refined by using our smartphone’s built-in camera app to take images, experimenting with autofocus or trying Gravity’s focus assistant to zoom in and ensure our images were sharp.

The resulting images could then be uploaded to a computer and adjusted with image-editing software if desired.

Vaonis Hestia 5 best features

Solar filter

The 3cm-diameter solar filter supplied with the Hestia Ultimate pack is essential to safely capture images of the Sun without risking eyesight or equipment. Simply screw it into the optical system and select ‘Day mode’ in the Gravity app, which includes details for observing the Sun and its sunspots, as well as partial solar eclipses. 

Ocular

The ocular is where the light from the night sky is focused. This is where the lens of a smartphone’s camera must lay across, though it must be an accurate placement to work properly. The ocular has a soft silicon lip to block unwanted external light from the smartphone’s camera.

Tripod

The Ultimate pack includes a telescopic tripod for the Vaonis Hestia and a pan-and-tilt fluid head with two axes (horizontal and vertical). The three-section tripod weighs 728g and reaches 109cm high. Hestia’s 3/8-inch thread can also be used with any compatible third-party photography tripod.

Phone brackets

The removable brackets consist of two magnets, each 6cm long and attached to an L-shaped piece of plastic. When positioned on the top of the Hestia, they cradle your smartphone reasonably well. They can then be gently nudged until the camera lens covers the ocular. 

Optical system

The Hestia has a patented optical system. Light is collected and then funnelled through a six-lens optical system, comprising a 30mm objective lens and prisms, before exiting the ocular at the top of the product and directing focused light to the camera sensor. The manual focus ring allows rough sharpness adjustments.

Vital stats

• Price: $399 (Ultimate pack)
• Optics: Six lenses in three groups
• Aperture: 30mm (1.2-inch)
• Focuser: Manual focus ring
• Field of view: 1.8°
• Magnification: 25x
• Limiting magnitude: 7–8
• App control: Gravity (iOS and Android)
• Extras: Tripod with pan-and-tilt head, solar filter, solar pointer, carry case
• Dimensions: 17 x 24 x 5.5cm 
• Weight: 850g 
• Supplier: Vaonis
• Tel: +33 4 84 98 00 21
• www.vaonis.com