Over the last couple of years I’ve been struggling to do a little astrophotography on the cheap. I’ve used an entry level Newtonian with a second hand mirrorless camera, neither of which were designed for the purpose. However, the limitations of the equipment were beginning to show. Attempts to photograph the Virgo galaxy cluster and the Horsehead nebula proved fruitless. The scope and camera had to be controlled independently, so I had to sit beside them outside and monitor everything they do, manually taking individual pictures with no real idea how they would turn out.

So I bought myself one of these, a Seestar S50, one of the new generation of “smart” telescopes.

https://www.365astronomy.com/zwo-seestar-s50-all-in-one-smart-apo-refractor-telescope

It’s a bit more money than I’m used to spending on this hobby, but if my first night out with it is anything to judge by then I think it’ll be worth it. And in comparison to some, it’s relatively cheap.

https://www.365astronomy.com/celestron-origin-intelligent-home-observatory-6-rasa-smart-telescope

It’s about two feet tall, including the tripod, and weighs roughly the same as a bag of sugar. So you can pick it up with one hand and take it anywhere. It contains a highly quality lens system, a low noise camera sensor, a dew heater to prevent it misting up, a dual narrow-band light pollution filter, a solar filter, an auto-focuser, tracking software and image stacking software. Everything is controlled from a single phone app that, fortunately for me, is almost idiot proof.

I used to spend a considerable part of each night just trying to get things in focus. Sometimes I’d have to repeat each session multiple times just to be sure of getting the focus spot on. The Seestar app has an auto-focus button. I just press that and, as if by magic, within a few seconds everything is in perfect focus.

It seems to have quickly become a tradition that the first thing everybody does with the Seestar S50 is photograph either Andromeda or the Orion Nebula, and I’m no exception. so let’s get them out of the way.

These are pretty much how they came out of the box. I’ve brightened them a bit, probably too much in the case of Andromeda, but otherwise haven’t done any post processing on them. The Seestar also let’s you save the individual image files so that you can do your own selection and stacking rather than rely on its algorithms. I haven’t got around to that yet. The one night I’ve spent with it gave me more data than I previously got in a month. It’ll take me weeks to work my way through it all.

Just to prove that it really could take the pictures that I couldn’t take before. Here’s part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies and the famous horsehead nebula. Again, I’ve cropped and brightened the images very quickly, with no real attention to detail.

The big white blob at the top of the horsehead picture is the star Alnitak, the left hand star in Orion’s belt.

One of the downsides of the Seestar is also illustrated in the horsehead picture. If you look carefully at the right hand side of that image, you’ll see vertical streaks running at an increasing angle down the right hand side. This is because of the type of mount that it uses. It can go up and down and left to right. This allows it to track the positions of objects in the sky. However, if you think about it, objects don’t just appear to move across the sky, they also appear to rotate. The Seestar can’t fully compensate for this, with the result that longer exposures cause the effect you see. There’s a well known way around this, but as this was my first night out I wasn’t going to try anything elaborate.

A couple of more galaxies, Bode’s galaxies and the Triangulum galaxy.

There are a couple of lines across the bottom of the left hand image of Bode’s galaxies. This isn’t a telescope artefact this time, but a plane flying across one of the frames. When I do my own stacking I’ll get rid of this frame.

And now a couple of old favourites, the Double Cluster in Perseus and T Corona Borealis – our unexploded star. The Double Cluster picture is way better than anything I’ve previously taken with my old setup. Despite being one of the largest and brightest objects in the sky, my old telescope often had difficulty finding the Double Cluster. The Seestar uses a technique called “plate solving”. Essentially it compares what it sees with its internal database of stars, figures out where it’s pointing, and moves to the desired location. All with no user intervention whatever.

T Cor Bor has disappeared from the evening sky in the west, but if you wait until about 4 am it rises above the eastern horizon again.

And finally, that sun-with-a-bird picture. This time I’ve included another sun-with-a-bird picture from the next day. When you’re imaging the sun, especially when you take movies over a couple of minutes, it’s actually surprisingly common to see a plane or a flock of birds transit the sun’s disk. Notice how the sunspots move with the sun’s rotation from one day to the next.

My other scope has about ten times the light gathering power of the Seestar, so it isn’t redundant. And it’s got one thing that the Seestar doesn’t have, an eyepiece, so you can actually look at the sky with your eyes rather than a phone. But for sheer convenience and it’s ability to record images, the new box is quite unbelievable. I might even try driving a few miles out of town to escape some of the light pollution in my back yard.

But I’ve saved the best bit for last. As it’s controlled by a single, dedicated, phone app, and you can operate it over wi-fi, I can sit in the comfort of my living room in shorts and t-shirt, glass of wine in hand, and tell the telescope exactly what I want it to do. Then I just sit back and watch as the images appear on my screen. No more shivering for hours outside in the cold. In fact, the telescope barely needs me at all.