Last Wednesday, I took it out to practice Solar Observing setup and observation. By the time I got it out, the sky was turning somewhat milky, but I figured that I'd give it a go anyway. Not surprisingly, it had difficulty acquiring the Sun, and I gave it up.
The next day, I got out again. This time nice clear sky. The Stellina had difficulty acquiring the Sun. It appeared not to be tracking while the Sun moved on away from where it was pointing. I tried helping it manually during acquisition, and after several attempts finally got an image, but the image marched steadily off the screen without manual assistance. Clearly something was quite wrong.
I left the scope out for the rest of the day, to see if night observing was also affected - in anticipation of my upcoming failure report to Adorama / Vaonis.
In the evening, I experienced all my normal easy initialization as usual. I shot a quick image of the Moon, then got a late-in-the-season image of Orion, then got an image of the Double Cluster in Perseus. I was elated, thinking that for some reason the Solar observing mode software was at fault. I wet over to get an image of M1, and it started out fine. After a while, I saw that the image updates were taking a long time to come in. For me, this is usually an indication of clouds moving in, so I went outside to check the sky. The sky was perfect for observing - and the gear grinding sounds that accompanied the scope doing its tracking maneuvers were loud and frightening.
On Friday, I first tried Vaonis, of course, but I was too late for their Friday hours - they leave for the weekend at 1:30 PM local time and I was doing this late in the morning here. So, I'm unable to speak with the good folks in France until Monday, at least.
I spent some hours online and on the phone with Customer Service at Adorama. They have my purchase record, and we see that they shipped my Stellina to me on March 9, 2022. The 2 year warranty has gone past by several days. The person I was speaking to at Adorama was very courteous and professional, but sorry, you have to go to Vaonis on this issue.
Now, panic is setting in. With the Eclipse approaching, and a broken scope that will take who knows how long to ship to France to be repaired and shipped back, I decided to look for what is available these days. I had a great surprise to find that the Stellina is no longer offered for sale at Vaonis, and only 1 or 2 of their Resellers here in the US have any in stock - for the original price of $4000. What is available is the Vespera line, with the original Vespera still available (but about to fall off the list), the Vespera II, and the Vespera Pro (announced as coming soon back in January, and still labelled as coming soon).
The Vespera II is less than half the price of the Stellina, and sports an enhanced field rotator and a larger sensor (8MP vs 6MP). Of course, let's remember that the Stellina was an 80mm scope and the Vespera is a 50mm scope. Does that make any difference for doing
After another hour on the phone with Adorama, I purchased the Vespera II. They did not have the Solar filter in stock, but Highpoint Scientific did, so I purchased the Solar filter there. All of this is inbound to me now. I am very disappointed that my Stellina seems to have only lasted 2 years before requiring major repair. I am also very disappointed to be spending another large amount (but considerably less than $4000) to keep on doing
Thanks for listening. I'll post more as the Vespera arrives and I give it a go.
smp