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I resisted smart telescopes for years — then one changed my life
The last dark skies of spring are the perfect time to get to know a new smart telescope and go deep-sky stargazing.
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When I go in search of dark skies, I like to travel light. Backpack light. With a full-frame camera, a tripod and some binoculars on my back, I can get everything I want from the night sky, save for the close-up views that only a telescope could bring. A telescope is such a burden when traveling. It's heavy and delicate, making any trip feel like a driving tour where you're never more than a few feet from your vehicle. No thanks — astrotourism for me is about exploring.
I stuck to my "no telescope" rule for years, right up until a trip to New Brunswick's dark-sky corridor a few years ago, when I packed a small Seestar smart telescope I had been asked to test. Almost as an afterthought, I wedged it into my camera bag instead of a lens I didn't use that much. It was tiny. Would I use it? Maybe.
I set it running outside a cabin on the Fundy Coast and forgot about it for half an hour while I took some wide-angle photos of the beautifully clear night sky. When I checked up on it — something you can do just by looking at an app on a smartphone — I could see the Whirlpool Galaxy clearer than ever before. That was the moment my old rule broke. In the smart telescope era, traveling light doesn't have to mean leaving a telescope behind.
At its core, a smart telescope is still an optical telescope — collecting light with a mirror or lens — but instead of sending that light to your eye, it focuses it onto a digital sensor. There's no eyepiece. In some ways, they're miniaturized versions of big, professional telescopes like Hubble and Webb, capturing digital images rather than sending light directly to your eye. Once powered on, the telescope points itself by taking a quick image of the sky and matching star patterns against an internal database — a process called plate-solving. After that, you just select a target in the app, and the telescope slews to it automatically. Then it begins taking lots of short exposures, stacking them in real time so the image slowly improves. That gradual build-up is something beginners often miss: the first few seconds rarely look like much. Leave it running for ten or twenty minutes, and structure starts to appear. What you see is a live image on your phone or tablet that you can easily share. For some, the ability to instantly share images is the killer feature.
People keep telling me that some amateur astronomers and astrophotographers hate smart telescopes with a passion. They hate the fact that your eyes are not seeing photons from another galaxy, just pixels on a screen. They miss the eyepiece. I don't disagree with any of that — nothing beats looking at a distant object with your own eyes through a large, expensive and very heavy telescope — but for astrotourism, a smart telescope easily wins out. Besides, everything looks clearer and more colorful through a smart telescope compared to a purely optical telescope.
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A few months after I returned from New Brunswick, I headed down to a star party in Florida. I couldn't quite believe how many large Dobsonian telescopes were in the same field (one had a 70-inch aperture), but even more surprising was what I could see perched below almost every single one — a pint-sized smart telescope quietly collecting shots of distant nebulas, galaxies and globular clusters that go straight to a smartphone. Where are the so-called purists who hate smart telescopes? I'm yet to actually meet one.
The Northern Hemisphere's late-spring sky is a good place to point a smart telescope. Around this time of year, the last properly dark nights are still hanging on before summer twilight starts to interfere. After sunset, give it a couple of hours for the sky to darken fully, th