Vaonis Hyperia: $45k digital telescope | Hacker News Reader

Vaonis Hyperia: $45k digital telescope

vaonis.com

78 pointsnycdatasci72 comments

I would say don't buy this -- but if you had $45k to spend on astronomy, you'd either be extremely passionate and know what you were doing, or you wouldn't care about that money.

Some of the fun of amateur astronomy is that you can take incredible pictures with cobbled together bits and pieces, and rigs are entirely upgradeable and modular. I don't think you can upgrade this thing at all. I don't think you can debug it, tweak it, or otherwise modify it. Hell, it has me to believe that Zicral or whatever brand name for 7075 aluminum is entirely impenetrable.

I've had a blast carefully selecting bits of equipment and incrementally upgrading my rig as I developed new skills.

Also, for $45k, I'd do a fuckload better than this thing. Holy shit would I do better than this thing. I bet I could get better space pictures with $10k than like 12 of these things stacked on top of each other. And if anyone wants to give me $10k, I will happily bet $45k that I can come up with a better picture than this thing.

If you're interested in starting with astrophotography, check out cloudynights.com, the warmest & friendly astronomy forum you could hope for. And the best part about it is -- it's not trying to rip you off!

If you're looking for the Craigslist of astro gear, check out astromart.com

And if you want to see some amazing space pictures by amateur astronomers who spent way, way, way, way less than $45k, check out astrobin.com

I’m about $15k in the astro-hole, and it goes a long way - about the same spec as this all in all - 14” Schmidt-cassegrain, Moravian with the 16200, filter wheel, mount, and all the rest. It all started with a little 6” scope and a cheap colour cmos imager - but I don’t feel the need to go beyond what I have. Except maybe a solar scope. And maybe a better cmos imager than my noisy SLR for planetary stuff. And maybe a new observatory.

It’s worse than having a drug habit, sometimes.

I’m not the target market for this thing at all, but at least it’s a respectable telescope and camera combo - an awful lot of stuff in this category is laughable garbage.

According to the website, you can at least upgrade the image sensor. But let's be real, this thing ain't really for the hacker/DIY scene.

I think what you're paying for is minimized learning curve. If you actually want to invest the time and effort to learn the ropes, this isn't for you. If you want to go from "Whoa, look at those stars" to passable pictures with minimal effort, and you have a lot of disposable income, this is your rig.

>Just try out the power of the most advanced astronomical instrument ever developed.

I don't say this lightly ... are these people high?

It's a (very nice) ground-dwelling optical telescope; am I missing some key magic here? All of the 'body and soul' nonsense in the world wouldn't make this 'the most advanced astronomical instrument ever developed.' .

>Hyperia is made of Zicral, an alloy used in the aerospace industry for its outstanding mechanical performance and exceptional resistance to extreme conditions.

With my tendency to kick expensive conversation pieces, this is perfect for my next inevitable biweekly meltdown!

(...I think they are)

On a more serious note: This is clearly aimed at... whoever wants to say that they maxed out all possible stats on an object, and not the professional market.

It's gonna look great mounted on someone's yacht next to their private island they visit once a year.

the loser who buys this has to be able to quote that line to their friends

Yeah. And it's a refractor. A 150mm refractor. So its light-gathering power is not great, it's much heavier than it needs to be, and that apochromatic triplet lens is gonna be much, much more expensive than a mirror that's twice as big.

This is a wealth signifier like a diamond-encrusted cell phone. It's not a serious astronomical instrument.

Well okay it's not a horrible instrument. But it's kinda like spending $thousands on a Class A tube amplifier: Inefficient as hell with results indistinguishable from something that costs 1/10 as much.

>Hyperia is made of Zicral, an alloy used in the aerospace industry for its outstanding mechanical performance and exceptional resistance to extreme conditions.

Had to look this up, only to find out that it's just 7075 aluminum.

This got me thinking, though, what would be interesting is an outdoor rated all-sky camera that can be permanently mounted and powered with PoE, is easy to clean off, doesn't get fogged up, and has an extremely high light sensitivity including near infrared bands. Then you could watch for aircraft, meteors and satellite flares with some precision (assuming you have a GPS location for the camera.)

I think the closest thing would be one of the Sony alpha series DSLRs with a very wide angle lens, then possibly a HDMI to Ethernet device.

I can't reliably offer a comment on the optics of this device.

But I can say there is some level of amateur-ish marketing going on, and that doesn't bode well for the actual product.

Don't advertise the weight of the product in pounds but use European math notation for all of the other specs. In the west, we use decimal notation for numerical values not commas.

Among the core customer market (astro photography minded people), we understand the metric system. In fact, it's easier to reason about optical devices in metric than imperial.

Yes, I'm an American native who understands the metric system.

Edit: Plus the naming of this thing. I know short domain names are in short supply these days. But come on.

"Vaonis Hyperia"? Just name it "TwiddlyDoo Big Dick Telescope". At least the random search mis-types will help with marketing and search engine results.

> In the west, we use decimal notation for numerical values not commas.

They're in France. Which is in "the west"? Also where they use commas for the decimal separator.

> Yes, I'm an American native who understands the metric system.

But apparently not the concept of localisation?

And apparently you completely missed that my entire comment is about poor localization.

My comment stands. Clearly the measurements being presented are meant to reach an American/Canadian/English/UK market. But it's an extremely awkward mix.

I apologize for summarizing "in the west" as purely North American. That's obviously not true and my fault for lack of specific country knowledge. Of course France is a core center of Western culture. Sorry French friends, I am a dumb American trying to do better.

"I apologize for summarizing "in the west" as purely North American."

Don't apologize, on HN only the US exists, it's the most geocentric place I frequent.

What he is arguing that you should not localize to the US because of the product. That has a point

And if you are localizing to a country, be sure to do it in the local vernacular.

Why do you think the page is localized to the US? Because the page is in English? I'm German and >90% of the stuff I read on the internet is in English.

The languages are FR and EN on that page. So it's for the French speaking world and EN seems to be for everyone who knows English but doesn't speak French (like myself).

"Contact us" on the page says

"Contact our customer service on +1 (646) 956-5933 (US) +33 4 84 98 00 21 (EU)"

So it looks IF the pages is localized it is for the US and EU. And because a minority of people in the EU speak French, it looks like the EN version of the page is for them too.

Is it really for people in the US, "If it's English, it's only for me"?

Is the reason for this that people in the US can't imagine people speaking more than one language? What could be the reason for that attitude?

If you're going to publish a page in English publish all of the page in English. A page that's 98 percent in English is just a page in English with a bunch of mistakes.

As a french I would like to see them succeed, but at this price point your communication should be perfect. While the comma is perfectly valid in english, is an international standard and widely used in other languages, the fact is that in english the dot is the standard.

"In the west, we use decimal notation for numerical values not commas."

Not sure what you mean with this, Germany uses commas for numerical values and I thought we are part of "the West". We might use dots for thousands. But I might also argue in "the West" we use the uppercase "W" - so I might not get the nuances.

There is probably a demographic that would get excited by the esthetics of this and can easily splurge and has a third or fourth vacation home in a dark sky location.

(Remember, the most valuable European company peddles luxury products)

The fun question is what fraction of that demographic is on HN.

Heck, there may be some here who could afford their own JWT.

JSON Web Tokens are cheap.

Oops. JWST. Although the S seems superfluous.

I’d like to believe very few are on HN

This seems like something you’d buy if you’re later on in your finance/property/legal/medical career and have “made it” and are buying token toys that look nice and are lots of fun to use once in a while.

Question for fun: what other products fit this category? Leica cameras? Ferraris?

that would be my hope too, but we might be taking the "hacker" component in HN too literally :-)

> what other products fit this category?

wristwatches and ball pens used to fit the bill but the digital age has not been kind. The algorithm to find more is: gadget that can be luxurised (made more expensive without adding substantial new functionality) with the sole purpose of helping homo sapiens groups stratify according to status / wealth

association with shiny, noble, metals (aluminum, silver, gold) is essential. our collective psyche is traumatized by the long exposure to the bronze / iron age and all that corroding crap we had to endure

you could extrapolate that luxury products are negative entropy markers: signaling that the bearer has the ability to manipulate society to strike a special thermodynamical contract with nature

> gadget that can be luxurised (made more expensive without adding substantial new functionality) with the sole purpose of helping homo sapiens groups stratify according to status / wealth

I’m not sure if you just came up with that or it’s based on some kind of well known definition but wow, what a clear and succinct way to describe it.

The interesting thing about wristwatches is that the digital age was indeed not kind to 90% of them, but in many ways the “quartz crisis” actually forced the survivors to pivot into being wealth signals.

It’ll be interesting to see what the smart watch revolution does to the classic brands

In America a second vacation home in a dark sky area isn’t too expensive because of its remoteness. A person looking for ideas to entertain guests that isn’t another hot tub or fire pit or whatever might easily buy one of these to check out the stars and show pretty pictures of space.

There are plenty of people with that kind of money here on HN.

in the scheme of things its indeed money well spent. astronomy always triggers introspection and "deep" discussions and that's something we could have more of

What a hype, pardon the pun.

"Just try out the power of the most advanced astronomical instrument ever developed."

I don't know... I am sure the telescopes professional astronomers use are more advanced... some operate even in space.

"Hyperia is made of Zicral, an alloy used in the aerospace industry for its outstanding mechanical performance and exceptional resistance to extreme conditions."

What are they going to do with a telescope like this such that it needs that material... other than charge a premium for it?

"Enhanced sensor sensitivity with 91% quantum efficiency."

The most important factor of the performance of the telescope are the lenses (and location for weather/light pollution). This is just ordinary.

Zicral sounds fancy, but it’s a standard, if high performing aluminium alloy used for all sorts of things. Given the price point I would hope to see a titanium alloy or carbon fibre to really juice the specs.

Carbon fiber would be a no-brainer for weight and focus stability. It is not even that expensive.

If they just added some A.I. thing and the trifecta would've been complete.

Generally for anything other than casual viewing, the mount that the telescope rides on is generally considered most critical. You can put a modest telescope on a good quality mount and produce some great photographs, or amateur science if you want. No telescope will be able to overcome the faults of a mount that can't drive it with great accuracy. Notably their site has very little to say about the mount itself (except that it's "direct drive").

I'd say the most important factors for astrophotography are in order:

1. Location and weather

2. Optics

3. Sensor, tracking and post processing

They can't control the first, but it seems they put everything in (3) instead of (2). The telescope is a 15cm refractor. I don't know any amateur astronomer using a refractor, let alone one with this budget. Refractors introduce further optical aberrations compared to first surface mirrors, usually collect less light and have shorter focal lengths for the same telescope size. Is there something I'm missing?

More likely it's a marketing ploy to gather a nerd army to shout at them and attract the less caring audience to their another overpriced product. Does this Hyperia even exist at all? In this market, it's more typical to rebrand an existing proper device than to make something like this. If it really does, it's just a pitch for people with more money than astrophoto knowledge.

This is a Veblen good. It doesn't have to excel at anything.

> I don't know any amateur astronomer using a refractor, let alone one with this budget.

Refractors are very popular in amateur astronomy and astrophotography.

https://www.cloudynights.com/forum/67-refractors/

The pricing on this Hyperia is pretty silly though. You can get a Takahashi 150mm refractor for ~$15K (well, if you can get one) which surely is far better quality optics than this unknown brand, and adding all the extras for feature parity should still come in at half the price or less.

Thanks for the correction! Was probably my local bias tending to either cheaper reflectors or using public observatories.

Apparently, they are very popular. But why are they very popular?

Very good contrast. Usually no need for collimation. No diffraction spikes (well, SCT don't have that either).

In my experience, a decent refractor just does what it needs to do, without drama. There's no mirror to collimate, no mirror to flop. Once the imaging train is dialed in, you let it cool for a bit, you focus, you take pictures. It just works. I confess to missing a reflector's diffraction spikes, but the unobtrusiveness of a decent refractor is almost luxurious given everything that can go sideways with astro-imaging.

Agreed. I debated for a long time but went with refractors (StellarVue). The simplicity and quality are nice, and as you say it just works. I'll probably get a large reflector at some point, maybe, but refractors are great for simple high quality. Astrophotography is my primary interest.

I'm an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer and it seems to me the market for this is very limited. Most beginners start with simple 'scopes to dip their toes into the waters and see if they're into astro at all. Most advanced amateurs assemble their setups themselves (going through many iterations/variants over the years).

This here is a turn-key, high-end solution (mostly for deep sky photography) for... whom? Very rich beginners wanting immediate results, maybe?

Bah! Now HERE is a telescope!

https://telescopes.net/planewave-pw1000-1-meter-observatory-...

I’d take a $10k 20” Dobsonian over this any day. The live viewing would be so much better, and you’d have far more than enough cash to sort out a perfectly good tracking and optical system for photography.

Appending Reddit to a search is still undefeated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAstrophotography/comments/l250it...

Some reviews of the $2500 scope and in general of the company. Not great. Does anyone have an example of a real image taken with this model?

While I can't comment on the quality of their telescopes, the people at /r/astrophotography are not the target market of these kind of telescopes. It would be like asking Stallman his opinion on a nintendo switch

Looking at the pictures at the end of the article, it is clear what the target market is.

You have a multi-million dollar house in a remote location. You have a swimming pool, an jacuzzi, a home theater, etc... the whole package. You also have beautiful night skies, so of course you want a telescope. And this is the perfect fit. Aesthetically, it fits a modern, luxury house. It looks easy to use and while as a scientific instrument, you can get much better value for your money, it will get you decent pictures. And while $45k is expensive, relative to the a multi-million dollar house and the kind of equipment you can expect in such a place, it is not so... astronomical.

I can easily imagine a rich family and their guests, in vacation, saying "we had a good day at the swimming pool, let's go to the rooftop and look at the stars".

To make it clear, I say this with absolutely no contempt.

As others point out, the English localization is quirky. My favourite: "Design\nmale word" and "Intelligence\nfemale word" which I suspect in the French localization looks like the dictionary entry marketing trope, i.e. "Design\nnom masculin" & "Intelligence\nNom féminin" Since nouns in English have no grammatical gender, it would be best to just leave that out of the EN localization.

I know nothing about amateur astronomy gear; but the site looks fine apart from a little quirk here or there.

I like to think that was debugging code or someone forgot to wrap the string with t() call in drupal or something.

This is definitely the nicest all in one that I’ve seen yet. I guess there is a market for this somewhere but I don’t get who.

At 45k though, they really should have used a mount that doesn’t suffer from field rotation on longer exposures.

Also, the tube seems long, would have went with a more compact design OTA and a wider aperture.

I’m happy to see the full frame sensor with 16bit ADC, seems no expense was spared there.

At 165lb it's going to be a hell of a thing to cart around to dark sky sites, particularly those at altitude. Even with a 4wd vehicle. How did they get a 15cm refractor to be that heavy when it's made of aluminium?

Optical astronomy is a bit tired, anyway. Pity that no one is making a decent radio telescope for the hobby market.

aren't most rigs that are even a fraction of the cost a challenge to cart around?

OK maybe this is a dumb question but if I have a camera with a 600 f/4 lens and I put a 1.4x TC on it for a 840mm f/5.6 lens won't that be a very similar FOV? And I can use my existing camera? And I can take 1,000 photos align and stack them in software? How much better would this $45k system be than that?

Depends on the lens. Lenses made for general photography often don't stack up against a good triplet astrograph when it comes to things like chromatic aberration, field flatness, sharpness etc. You will also need a good tracking mount and some form of guiding (e.g. dedicated guide scope + guide camera). That said, you can do much better than Hyperia with much less money.

The styling is pretty similar to the old Apple iSight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISight#/media/File:ISights.jpg

About 10x larger, but the pictures don't have anything for scale comparison!

I was going to make a similar comparison.

There is a lot of dismissal in this discussion but there are people here like me who buy macbook pros that are solid/overbuilt, beautiful, just work without maintenance, and have very limited upgrade paths.

If I had the money and property I might be tempted. “Point and shoot” is the phrase that comes to mind. The thing looks like it will work the few times a year I remember to get excited. You can let friends have a go and take requests throughout the year, etc.

But I don’t have the means so I come here for the valuable alternative clues!

I would almost expect something like this, at this price point, to have a replaceable camera back, probably with a medium format sensor…

If I'm not mistaken, it does mention the sensor being replaceable.

"Equipped with Sony's latest technological gem, the IMX455 full-frame monochrome sensor, Hyperia is not only state-of-the-art but is set to remain so forever.

Our evolutionary system means you can replace the existing sensor with the latest technology on the market. You can always remain one step ahead and benefit from the very best."

That’s full frame and not medium format, no?

Replacable but with full-frame.

> Just try out the power of the most advanced astronomical instrument ever developed.

Pretty sure they just mean telescopes in general ;)

It says the sensor is CMOS. I thought CCDs were the preferred sensor for astrophotography. Am I behind the times?

Sorry but yes, you are behind times. CMOS is all the rage in recent years. Google ZWO, Altair cameras, etc. Sony sensors mostly.

How can they claim this:

> Just try out the power of the most advanced astronomical instrument ever developed

???

By the way, all the pictures they show are coloured (if from this telescope): the sensor the use in this device is monochromatic.

And space is not this colorful.

it's exceedingly common to use a monochromatic sensor with different filters and then combine them in post. you might use visual filters - e.g., take 3 exposures using red/green/blue filters, but it's also common to use filters for specific wavelengths e.g. hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, and then assign RGB to each filter arbitrarily

there's lots of other red flags with this product but I wouldn't care about this one

at 45k$ I do hope they have added astronomy filters to their telescope

The presentation of the website is world class. Well done

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