Pegasus SmartEye

Every now and then, something truly new appears on the market. Such is the case with the SmartEye eyepiece. Is this an eyepiece that thinks it is a camera? Or an imaging device with pretensions of being an eyepiece? Steve Ringwood could not wait to review it.

Steve Ringwood

At a glance

Imaging sensor: Sony IMX533 Color CMOS (3008 × 3008) 3.75micron pixels. Eye lens display: UHD 2560 × 2560 pixel look-through display with 12 mm eye relief. Temperature control: 2 Stage Thermoelectric Cooling (TEC) – down to 30°C below ambient. Connectivity: Dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4 / 5 GHz), Bluetooth 5. Power requirements: 5V / 3A Weight: 795 g (28 oz) Details at: smarteyepiece.com/ Sample supplied by 365astronomy b2b.365astronomy.com/pegasus-astro-smarteye-smart-eyepiece Price: approximately £1,799

Promising to enhance the experience of both visual and imaging astronomy, the Pegasus SmartEye has the size and appearance of a large conventional imager. At its heart is Sony’s impressive IMX533 Colour CMOS sensor, which offers a low-noise 9MP 3008 × 3008 3.76 micron pixel array. The received data is passed directly to SmartEye’s 2560 × 2560 Ultra High Definition visual display, where it is viewed by the observer via an eye lens. Simply put this is a self-contained unit deployed as an enhancing eyepiece. It also features an ability to stack incoming light and present to the observer’s eye an image otherwise impossible to gain from a standard visual eyepiece.

It has an onboard control system, mediated by a click-stop rotary button, providing access to a menu system visible through the eye lens. This accesses primary functions and parameters such as display brightness, gain and duration of stacking integration. The click-stops are rather feeble though, and however delicately I turned, over-running one click to finish on the next was a constant irritation. There is also an inward push on this button to make a menu selection, but so weak is the click-stop that even this action sometimes moved the result to an adjacent option.

I have another small gripe about the protective canvas case. As delivered, it securely and snugly contains the USB-C power cable (altogether too short, by the way), a 12v to 5v rectifier, the SmartEye itself, a 2” nosepiece adapter, and end caps for the eye lens and adapter. Separately they fit into their case but once the 2” adapter is screwed on to the SmartEye with caps either end, it will not go back in. So, you are left with a choice of leaving the device capped and ready (but unprotected) outside the case, or disassembled inside the case requiring tedious reassembly before each use. This can be remedied by some sharp work with a hobby blade but feels like a classic case of designers not talking to users. I also found it oddly remiss that although a 12v to 5v rectifier was supplied, a 12v car socket adapter was not included.

Focussing, ready for use

As implied, once the USB-C power line is inserted, the SmartEye is deployed just like any eyepiece, with an m48 filter thread available in the adapter, too (IR/UV blocker recommended).

There are essentially two selectable observing modes. The first is Live View. This provides an unenhanced image that is purely used for focussing. Before commencing an imaging run, I used a Bahtinov interference screen on a star near my target to hone the focus. The live view mode delivers a 0.5 second refreshed exposure. I found this too slow for normal optical focussing. You have to remember that the image is being delivered to the eye lens via an imaging sensor, not by raw eyepiece glass, and so infinitesimal adjustments can be lost in the 0.5 second integration time. At least with a Bahtinov refraction pattern you can isolate the exact focus at leisure.

Then the fun begins. For my main testing I used an 81 mm f/5.9 William Optics GT81 apochromat refractor (sometimes with a 0.5 × focal reducer), riding shotgun on a Meade LX200 14” ACF. As a point of interest, viewed conventionally, the SmartEye is said to behave like an 11 mm eyepiece with a 90º apparent field of view. These details will enable users to calculate the effective real sky field of view on their instruments, using online tools such as those found at the astronomy.tools website.

Each year, the damp cloud-ridden autumn skies seem to become less friendly to astronomers, but at least the longer hours of darkness make some recompense. They also offer a great evening view of the Andromeda galaxy (M31).

I set the GT81 on nearby 4th magnitude υ Andromeda and carefully focussed before executing a slight slew to the galaxy. In live view, the galaxy was a dim oval smear.

It has an onboard control system, mediated by a click-stop rotary button, providing access to a menu system

In stacking mode, there is a range of integration times offered, between 5 and 30 seconds. I found that 20 seconds was a sweet spot. Once integration time is selected, the next task is to cap the telescope and take some dark frames. The menu offers this function and rather cleverly, assigns these darks to your chosen parameters so that you do not have to repeat the task. Taking these dark frames is essential since, good though the sensor is, there are always misbehaving pixels that need to be removed from the final image.

Having completed all the preparation, I kicked off the stacking mode with a 20 second integration, and I watched through the eye lens as the miracle unfolded. After the first 20 seconds, the image relayed to the eye lens was already considerably brighter than visual alone, with Andromeda’s core shining intensely. As each 20 seconds passed, another image was laid on top of the previous, and quickly the galaxy and its fine detail were lifted from the gloom. Soon, the galaxy appeared far brighter and clearer than it does visually through my 14” LX200. Simply astonishing.

The initial stacked frames were impressive, but monochrome. Once the form of the image is established, the onboard processing sets to work adding colour. In three minutes, my galaxy was no longer bland and by six it was richly hued.

That is not the only trick up SmartEye’s sleeve. My LX200 mount, despite its age, manages to supply adequate sidereal tracking for normal use. But the imaging of faint deep sky objects still requires the guiding hand of software such as PHD2 to keep the mount’s gaze steady. Yet I had no need of it with the SmartEye. Processing within the unit ensures that image alignment is maintained throughout the capture and stacking process. In one of my trials, I cunningly jarred an image so that the stars were dragged into tiny dashes. But one or two stacks later, the SmartEye removed the result of my experiment, and the stars were restored to unblinking symmetry again.

Of course, systematic deviation over a long period may challenge even SmartEye’s stabilising capability and for this, an ST4 guiding port is onboard.

Remote use

You do not need to keep your eye to the eyepiece. The SmartEye has a WiFi capability that enables it to talk to a smart device running SkySafari software. I loaded my Android smartphone with SkySafari 7 Pro and I was able to view and control everything that was happening in the eyepiece via the camera control facility within the software. It also offered another means of viewing captured objects as they developed during stacking.

My next target was the great nebula in Orion (M42). Again, I used the Bahtinov on a nearby star (this time, 2nd magnitude Alnitak on Orion’s belt) to achieve critical focus. Slewing to the nebula in Live View mode, my target swam into the eyepiece’s gaze already fairly bright. I could not imagine a better view; that is until I switched to stacking mode. As the SmartEye did its work, steadily more of the diffuse nebula became a glowing detailed cloud with the burning bright Trapezium stars in the centre.

Just a few stacked frames in, vibrant colour began to creep in. Reds, blues and greens emerged. Astonishing.

The images featured in this review can only begin to give a flavour of what could be seen through the eye lens – and portrayed on the screen of my smartphone. Talk about punching above its weight! The SmartEye was lifting my humble 81 mm telescope to the ability of a telescope many times its aperture.

Hardware suggestion

When you rotate the SmartEye so that the eye lens screen and its menus are broadly horizontal to your line of sight, this immediately kinks the power cable, which enters the unit from above. If future models could rotate the display 180º so that the cable hangs vertically without bending, this would alleviate the problem.

Enhancing aperture is what the SmartEye has been designed to do, so it was only a matter of time before I wondered what this device could do attached to the 14” aperture catadioptric it had hitherto been simply hitching a ride on. Was the Hubble Space Telescope now in danger of becoming obsolete?

This time, I chose the Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra as my target. I find that it is always a good idea to test on familiar objects as faults are more easily spotted. Incredibly, it took a mere two and a half minutes for the object’s colour to appear and its central star to be captured – and for good measure the faint spiral galaxy IC1296 too, just 4 arc minutes away.

Getting into my stride, I moved then to an object that I have never seen well at all – the Dumbbell planetary nebula (M27). Although at the time of reviewing, in November, it was already sinking fast towards the north-western horizon, against a sea of stars, a radiant and technicolour image of the object soon emerged. Not only did the apple core primary shape become distinct almost immediately, but after letting the stacking run for 20 minutes, so much of the surrounding gas shell became visible that it looked more like an iridescent jellyfish.

Next, I looked at the Moon but unsurprisingly I did not fare well. Although SmartEye was able to handle the Moon’s brightness in Live Mode (by decreasing the display screen’s intensity), the stacking software could not handle an extended image so intrinsically bright. Even a five second exposure resulted in nothing but a blinding white snowstorm. This problem can easily be overcome by the provision of sub-second exposures and I will hastily point out that we are still only on version 1 of the onboard, updateable firmware.

I have no doubt that this is merely the beginning of the story of hybrid imaging eyepieces.

Imager or Eyepiece?

It can be argued that in essence this is an imaging device that, rather than sending its image to a PC, communicates the image to a screen immediately behind it, viewed by a lens. The image seen or transmitted to a smartphone cannot be said to be the live originating photons that you enjoy with a conventional eyepiece. However, this is a completely self-contained unit with sophisticated onboard processing that delivers the thrilling experience of ‘seeing’ objects with far greater clarity, brightness and colour than its native instrument could ever hope to achieve unassisted. Its only tethering is the USB-C power cable – and how long will it be before some bright spark at Pegasus works out a way of embedding battery power instead?

Aside from acting as a digital standalone eyepiece, it can also double as a conventional cooled astronomical camera, via ASCOM (Alpaca). It can also perform plate-solving too, in which stars in your image are matched to online star catalogues.

I have thoroughly enjoyed testing this marvellous device and I have no doubt that this is merely the beginning of the story of hybrid imaging eyepieces. Not sure that they yet have a generic name, but may I suggest, Eyecams?

Steve Ringwood is Astronomy Now’s Equipment Editor.