When the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie first tried to canoe across North America in 1789, he unwittingly followed a river that led him north to the Arctic instead of west to the Pacific. When he tried again (and ultimately succeeded) in 1793, he brought with him a special piece of navigational equipment imported from London: a telescope with enough power to see the moons of Jupiter, which would enable him to calculate his longitude accurately.

On my canoe trip down the Petawawa River in northern Ontario this summer, I did the same. I’d received a press release from a French company called Vaonis about their new Hestia portable smart telescope, which is the size of a hardcover book and uses your smartphone as its brains and viewfinder. Among their boasts: the Hestia enables you to see the moons of Jupiter! I had maps and GPS for navigation, but the idea of channeling Mackenzie by spending my evenings along the river peering into the heavens sounded fun, so I added a Hestia to my pack. Here’s how it went.

How It Works

The Hestia itself is nothing but a bunch of lenses and prisms packed into a rectangular case and weighing 1.87 pounds. There are no moving parts and no electronics. Once you attach your phone to it, you have a telescope with an aperture of 1.2 inches and a field of view of 1.8 degrees. That’s at the very bottom end of what you’d get from an inexpensive backyard telescope, but better than you’d get from the cheap portable monoculars you might buy for birdwatching or hunting. The magnification is 25X, and the price starts at $189 for the basic unit and can go up to $299 if you include accessories like a tripod and solar filter.

What gives the Hestia an edge for portable stargazing is the Gravity app that you download for your phone. Fancy telescopes can take very-long-exposure images because they have a motor that moves along with the stars; the Hestia doesn’t move, but the app takes multiple photos and digitally stacks them on top of each other, giving you exposure times of up to 30 seconds. The app can also analyze the stars in your field of view, figure out where the telescope is pointing, and then guide you towards whatever astronomical feature you’re looking for: planets, star clusters, galaxies, and so on.

When I first got the Hestia, I took it through its paces in a park near my home in Toronto, a city of 3 million with plenty of light pollution. It was underwhelming. There were so few stars in the sky that I had trouble getting six of them—the minimum required for the Gravity app’s star analysis to figure out where I was pointing—in the viewfinder. The poor visibility also made it difficult to focus properly.

I later tried it at a friend’s cottage outside the city, and had somewhat better luck. I still struggled to get the star analysis to work, but I was able to snap a nice picture of the moon:

I also used the included solar filter to take a picture of the sun, sunspots and all. This was less interesting than I expected, but it’s a reminder that the Hestia started as a Kickstarter project aimed at people who wanted to watch the 2024 solar eclipse.

Into the Wild

I figured the Petawawa River, in Algonquin Park, would be the perfect place to try the Hestia in earnest. During our six-day trip, we would be paddling right past the Algonquin Radio Observatory, a facility built in 1959 to observe outer space deep in the wilderness away from pesky cities.

I brought the telescope in its hard carrying case, along with the included tripod. There was some good-natured grumbling from some of my tripmates about the added weight in the portage packs, but it fit in nicely and was rugged enough to withstand rough handling.

It proved useful on our second day, when we were paddling down 2.5-mile-long Radiant Lake. About halfway along, we found a decent beach to camp on. Our maps told us there was one more suitable spot at the end of the lake, about a mile farther on. We wanted to cover more distance, but we didn’t want to risk having to double back if the site was already taken. I got out the Hestia, put it in “scenery” mode, and confirmed that there was indeed a canoe on the distant beach.

The stargazing that night was less successful. The stars were uncountable, but I still couldn’t get the Gravity’s star analysis working. It kept telling me that the scope was unstable. I’ve since realized that extending the tripod to its maximum height of roughly five feet makes it too wobbly, but that didn’t occur to me at the time. So I took some photos of random points in the sky:

It’s a nice photo. You can see some remarkable details, including something at the bottom right that I can almost imagine is Jupiter with a couple of moons. It’s not, though. Jupiter was below the horizon when I took that pic.

The Verdict

Back in Toronto, I tried a few more experiments with the telescope. Keeping the tripod at half-height kept it stable, which eliminated one problem. But there was simply too much light in my neighborhood to see enough stars for the star analysis. I managed to get it to work a few times, so that it could start directing me to the specific star cluster I was looking for, but not consistently. It’s tricky to get the focus, exposure, and ISO settings right, especially when there aren’t many stars in the sky.

I’m still intrigued by the idea. The Hestia is capable of seeing Venus’s rings, Jupiter’s moon, and other cool astronomical phenomena that would be totally new to me. Next time I’m outside the city, I’ll set it up again—at half-height—and give it another shot. But even if I master it, I’ll stick to GPS for navigation on my next canoe trip.