Seestar S50 Smart Telescope

The Seestar S50 is made by ZWO, who already make a number of Astro and ioptical products. A few Smart Telescopes have come onto the market over the past year or two, but the Seestar S50 is possibly the most popular.

A Smart Telescope is a unit that combines a scope, a camera and a tracking mount (plus a lot more features) in one very compact unit.

The S50 consists of an APO telescope, an Astrophotography camera/sensor, a GoTo tracking unit and a mini PC. There is no viewfinder or screen – the unit is driven by an app on your phone or tablet.

The effective magnifcation is very high as it combines a reasonably powerful tripley lens refractor connected to a very small HD quality sensor. The scope has a focal length of 250mm but with the tiny pixels on the small sensor, results in a crop factor that makes it equivalent to much higher.

In addition, it has built in GoTo system, specific settings for Moon and Sun shooting, very accurate Autofocus built in Light Pollution and UV cut filters, a solar filter for pictures of the sun. It stacks images internally and allows basic editing and can stack frames from video (for Moon, Planetary and Solar images).

It’s designed for someone with no Astro experience to be able to get some decent images straight out of the box, but it is much more than a beginners’s toy – once you get over the fact that it does most of the work for you automatically, it produces some excellent results andf is a fantastic addition to any Astrotog’s toolkit. It comes in a great little case with a robust, carbon fibre mini-tripod!