Smart Telescopes – Affordable & Amazing!

by Dr Paul E Cizdziel

Technology development in the last ten to fifteen years has revolutionized the capabilities for amateurs to photograph the night sky. Camera sensors, specialty equipment, and software for integration and color processing have all improved and become affordable. Imaging the night sky (astrophotography) is now a booming amateur photography sector and popular hobby.

Companies like Celestron, ZWO, SVBony, Askar, William Optics and several others are telescope suppliers. Nearly all amateur astronomy equipment is manufactured in China; they literally created this hobby. As for widefield Milky Way photography; DSLR or mirrorless cameras are primarily used. But seldom are those cameras employed for imaging deep-sky-objects like galaxies and nebulae due to multiple hardware limitations. Standard SONY sensors that work particularly well under low light conditions dominate the astrophotography application sector and have been adopted by specialty astro-camera manufacturers. Astro-cameras are surprisingly less complex, have computer-controlled firmware and some even include Peltier-cooling; making them quite different than typical consumer cameras.

These photographs were taken by the Seestar S30 on April 26-27 by the Laurus School Science Advisor @ Jogashima island (Miura, Kanagawa). The imaging time required to obtain these photos ranged from about 45 minutes to 90 minutes each. This YouTube video describes the capture of these images.

Seestar Smart Telescopes – Two models of Smart Telescopes available from ZWO include the Seestar S30 (white) and the Seestar S50 (black). The S50 has a more powerful telescope with slightly better resolution but it costs a bit more.

Of course, the overall best imaging systems are usually piece-meal assembled from various components by hard-core experienced amateurs (like myself). But such astrophotography systems can easily cost multiple thousands of dollars. Star-tracking mounts, telescopes, cameras, filters, guide-scopes, astro-computers, tripods and other components are almost all specialty products for this application. And their integration and operation can be rather technical. However, a recent trend has emerged among many astronomy product suppliers to offer low cost, fully-integrated, astrophotography systems for beginners. These are usually referred to as Smart Telescopes, and they are amazing!

At Laurus, we have the Seestar S50 smart telescope made by ZWO. A smaller and less expensive S30 model is available as well.

Dwarf Labs is a competing company that also has a similarly priced, entry-level system. Costing from around ¥60,000 to ¥80,000 yen (in Japan), these smart telescopes can take amazingly detailed photographs of the moon, distant galaxies, colorful gaseous nebulae, comets, star-clusters, and other deep-sky-objects. FYI, planets require higher-power magnification optics and hence they are not particularly good targets for smart telescopes. Any iPhone or Android device can be connected to a smart telescope via WiFi or Bluetooth for operation. All you do is (1) turn it on, (2) go to a menu-system that displays thousands of potential deep-sky objects, (3) select a target and press “Go Gazing”. All the rest is completely automatic. Of course, included are several more advanced features that do have a learning curve, but even those are simple to understand with the help of many YouTube videos.

The Dwarf Labs 3 (Smart Telescope) is a highly capable instrument with a few more features than the ZWO models. Its price is similar to the Seestar S50 (ZWO) model.

Displayed with this blog are pictures of the smart telescopes I described here, and multiple deep-sky-objects that I personally photographed with my Seestar S30. These images were captured at Jogashima Island (Miura, Kanagawa) on April 26-27.

However, thanks to the included special optical filters; hundreds of beautiful celestial objects can be imaged by these smart telescopes even under the heavily light-polluted skies of Tokyo or Yokohama.

Is there anyone not inspired by the beauty of the Milky Way or a dark night sky? Does not everyone wonder what`s up there and marvel at the infinity of the cosmos?

With smart telescopes, you can now learn and photograph the beauty of the universe that exists just beyond our limited eyesight; all at a reasonable cost and without any technical hurdles.

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A note from our Science Advisor, Dr Paul E Cizdziel

The Ad Astra room on the 10th floor of Laurus International Primary & Secondary School is primarily dedicated to space science education, an increasingly important part of modern education. This field of science covers everything from amateur photographers (like myself), to aerospace engineering, government agencies, research institutions, and a rapidly expanding and opportunity-rich commercial sector. My intention with this blog is to periodically provide information of general interest to students and parents on current topics across all these categories.