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A Small Telescope That Surprised Me
I was skeptical about smart telescopes for years. Then I bought a used Seestar S50 and found a surprisingly capable little imaging system: easy to use, remarkably stable, beginner-friendly, and open enough to work with the raw data in PixInsight and Photoshop. This is what changed my mind.
The first generation of devices I really noticed were instruments like the Unistellar eVscope or the Vaonis Stellina and Equinox. They were technically interesting, but they also cost several thousand euros. And at that price point, I inevitably compared them with what the same money could buy in conventional astronomy equipment. That comparison never really worked for me.
Some of those early devices tried to preserve the experience of looking through a telescope by placing a small display behind an eyepiece. Instead of looking directly at the light coming from an object in the sky, you were effectively looking at a camera image on a tiny screen. That always felt like an awkward middle ground.
If I want to observe visually, I would much rather use a traditional telescope. There is something fundamentally different about actually looking at Jupiter, a globular cluster or the Orion Nebula through an eyepiece. The image might be faint, imperfect and nowhere near the colourful photographs we are used to seeing online. But it is live.
And if the goal is simply to see an impressive image of an astronomical object, a quick image search will produce something vastly better than either a visual telescope or one of those early smart telescopes. From an astrophotographer's perspective, they did not make much more sense to me either.
Small optics, relatively modest cameras, limited control over acquisition, little freedom to configure the optical train. All of that at a price where you could already start building a fairly capable conventional astrophotography setup. So for years, I more or less filed smart telescopes under interesting technology, but not for me.
The situation changed with devices such as the ZWO Seestar series and the telescopes from Dwarflab. We are no longer talking about several thousand euros. Depending on the model, these instruments now cost somewhere in the range of a few hundred euros. That changes the equation.
The optics are still small. A 30 mm telescope is not suddenly going to compete with a large refractor or reflector, and many of the images I had seen from these devices did not particularly impress me compared with what I was used to producing with my normal astrophotography equipment. But that comparison is also slightly unfair.
At a few hundred euros, I am no longer asking whether a smart telescope can replace a serious visual telescope or a full astrophotography setup. I am asking how much capability can realistically be packed into such a small, inexpensive and self-contained system. And that turns out to be a much more interesting question.
For someone taking their first steps into astronomy or astrophotography, these instruments solve a remarkable number of problems at once.