A $500 Smart Telescope Surprised an Astrophotographer
A Small Telescope That Surprised Me
An astrophotographer who long dismissed smart telescopes as toys buys a used ZWO Seestar S50 on impulse. To his surprise, the tiny scope delivered stable tracking, decent images, and—crucially—raw FITS data that he could process in PixInsight, revealing far more detail than the app's automatic processing. He argues that for beginners, such devices remove most of the complexity of traditional astrophotography, making them a compelling entry point.
A tiny telescope that I had carried outside almost like a camera tripod had autonomously found a faint nebula, tracked it for several hours, stacked the exposures and produced a perfectly presentable image with almost no work from me.
- nameless912
I've been slowly (slowly....) working on an open source version of what the Seestar provides - a 3D printable shell, easily sourced mechanics and optics, open source electronics (3D printer controller boards are fabulous here). I love the idea of smart telescopes, but I also hope and believe that someday we'll have an open source equivalent to the easy entrypoint of, say, the S30.
Maybe I'm being too much of a purist because late model smart telescopes now allow you to grab the raw FITS files so the relative value of a fully open ecosystem is lower, but I'm trying to build towards the motivated teenager segment: someone who maybe has a Seestar or has seen one, and wants to have that experience, but wants to own it themselves and actually understand what's happening. I have the mechanics mostly working in Alt-Az mode, EQ mode is currently accomplished using a hinged plywood board fashioned into the world's shittiest polar alignment wedge, and now I'm working on figuring out how/where to source good enough optics. I have already learned a whack-ton designing the thing, and I hope that in the future the build will be interesting and informative enough for others to get a bunch of experience in Astrophotography for very little money.
You can buy the sensors used in a lot of these telescopes for <50USD on Aliexpress, the drive mechanics and electronics are ~80, and then all you should need (hopefully) is a cheapo Raspberry Pi 3 or equivalent, putting the total BOM at under 200 buc […]
- HelloUsername
If I understand correctly, this is only used for astrophotography? You can't actually view through it with your bare eyes? That, to me, was the main reason to buy a reflector/refractor telescope; to receive the actual light of a planet (okay actually the suns light bouncing off the planet) bouncing through a bunch of mirrors, lenses and eyepieces back into your own eyes. The first time finding and seeing Saturn and Jupiter with my own eyes was amazing.
- commieneko
Here's a 3D printed "nano dome" project that works for the smaller S30. Might work on the S50, not sure.
https://www.cloudynights.com/forums/topic/1000995-miniature-...
- cuasijoe
I have a high-end rig and this one. I use this one way more frequently due to the simplicity of the setup. You are capturing light in no time and it does not weight a ton. As long as you are conscious about its limitations, it’s a fun gizmo if you like astronomy or enjoy astrophotography.
- zelos
There is something fundamentally different about actually looking at Jupiter... The image might be faint, imperfect ... But it is live.
The astrophotography/live viewing split in astronomy is interesting. For me, the whole reason I do backyard astronomy is to find the objects myself and observe directly, to the point where even using an app like Stellarium feels a bit like cheating.