In 2019, French company Vaonis created a pretty revolutionary product – the Stellina. Around the same time, Unistellar, another French company, released their eVscope.
This was the start of the Smart Telescopes trend that has disrupted the astronomy and astrophotography gear world in the past few years.
These are telescopes operated via an app on your smartphone or tablet and have a camera built in. This means you have everything you need in one package to find and photograph planets, galaxies and other astronomical objects at the press of a button.
Vaonis and Unistellar launched a few new products in the years following but these were all pretty expensive (in the thousands of dollars), but a tempting budget alternative emerged in 2022 as a crowd-funded project called the Mirrosky smart telescope.
But now it seems to have now gone dark and people are questioning if the telescope they have paid for will every actually appear…
UPDATE – Mirrosky backers received an update in early-February 2024 saying:
“We sincerely apologize for the delay in shipping your Mirrosky orders and appreciate your patience and understanding during this time.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have encountered delays in our production and fulfillment processes.
After careful consideration and planning, we have set a new shipping date for all Mirrosky Backers. The anticipated shipping will commence after the Chinese New Year, on February 27, 2024.”
We will wait and see if it emerges now in 2024 and how it shapes up!
The Mirrosky Telescope Project
The Mirrosky Smart Telescope emerged on Kickstarter and Indiegogo in 2022 and presented a pretty slick and believable picture of a budget smart telescope.
The specifications were modest and it wasn’t promising the world for a cheap price. The images and videos produced to support all painted a picture of a viable project.
There are/were plenty of supporting sources of information:
- Mirrosky website (not currently working)
- Mirrosky Facebook page
- Mirrosky “Fans” group
- Mirrosky YouTube Channel
There are “reviews” on YouTube like this:
The Mirrosky App can be downloaded on the Android store.
It features screenshots of how you would connect to the telescope from your smartphone:
The app’s creator is listed as the Mirrosky Trading Company and has a Chinese phone number listed. This company can be found listed on this Hong Kong company directory.
But Then Mirrosky Goes Quiet…
On Kickstarter, the project managers posted 14 updates, starting on 20 October 2022, with the last one being on 20 May 2023.
This most recent update stated that the telescopes would be shipped in August 2023.
However, since then there have been no updates and no one has received anything.
If you look at the comments from backers on this page then you can see that people’s patience has run out and people are worried that they may have given money for nothing.
How much money has gone to Mirrosky?
At the time of writing the projects have received:
- 567 backers giving US$370,660 on Kickstarter
- 596 backers, US$375,964 on IndieGogo
Together this is 1163 individuals giving US$746,624 to this project.
Verdict: Will the Mirrosky Smart Telescope Appear?
As it stands, it doesn’t look good for anyone who invested money in these projects and for many it is likely very stressful.
This website that focuses on crowd-funding projects has it listed as a “scam” (their words, not mine):
I don’t know if it is a “scam” or just a business venture that has gone wrong, but those that put money in the projects are understandably angry and want either their money back or the product to emerge.
At the time of writing IndieGoGo has the campaign “under review” and Kickstarter are no longer accepting backers:
Since the Mirrosky emerged, two budget smart telescopes have arrived that are both genuine and good – the Dwarflab Dwarf 2 and the ZWO Seestar S50.
The fact that these appeared at a similar time as the Mirrosky and the efforts made to outline the project suggests to me that this was possibly a genuine project that just went wrong and was overtaken by other competitors (just a guess).
The crowd-funding sites will certainly give plenty of warnings about risk but at best the communications with backers is terrible.
If anyone from Mirrosky wants to get in touch then we will happily update this article (contact us).
