Peter's Seestar Experience.
The Seestar S50 is a smart telescope made by ZWO, a Chinese company well known for designing and manufacturing Astronomy Cameras and other associated products. I have owned mine for just over four months.
Smart telescopes are in fact a combination of a telescope, camera and guiding system all in one compact package. There are a number of smart scopes available, all at much higher prices with one exception which is very small and appropriately called a Dwarf II which generally does not take the same quality of image but is very compact for travel.
What distinguishes the Seestar is its price (currently £539) in the UK, its compact design and the software package meaning the unit can be controlled from almost any smartphone or tablet. ZWO are constantly improving the software and I have had at least five updates in the four months of ownership.
To operate the Seestar it generally takes less than 5 minutes from placing the unit to starting to take your image and your smart device will show you the image appearing in ten second takes which are stacked, one on top of another for as long as you want. It rejects any unsatisfactory images due to cloud, wind or atmospherics and the scope will track the target really very accurately. I have found with many well known deep space objects such as The Orion Nebula or the Andromeda Galaxy the image is identifiable after only three or four by 10 second takes and just continues to build in detail and quality as more images are stacked.
The images can be saved as Raw (Fits) files or JPGs which are saved both in the unit itself and onto your smart device. I have found the quality of the JPG images as taken to be very good and they can usually be enhanced using simple software such as Apple Photos. I have seen final images from some users that are taken in Raw and then put through a number of software processes to produce better images, but not by very much.
Overall the performance fantastic and it is so easy to move being less than 3.5 KG in weight.
Are there any negatives - levelling can be a bit tricky although it only needs to be within 3 degrees of horizontal. I now have an inexpensive tripod leveller which makes things a little easier.
A couple of times I have noticed that in some weather conditions with intermittent light cloud it does seem to keep some less than good images in the stack thus slightly reducing the quality of the final image.
The Autofocus is very accurate but can struggle in hazy conditions. However it is still possible to take images without a focus lock or use a manual focus point.
Overall a superb machine - it may sound a cliché, but it has changed my life.
Peter Sharp 12 04 2024