ZWO Seestar S50 Astronomical All-in-one Smart Telescope

Excellent scope for the price! The easy to use app, which just released the much anticipated EQ mode function, allows you to go to galaxies, nebula, star cluster, planets, and even comets at the push of a button. Even though you can see the planets, this is a deep space object telescope, so you really won't be able to get high quality images of the planets. The images gathered of DSOs though is amazing. The market has produced aftermarket attachments that enhance the functionality of this already amazing telescope.

I had been doing astrophotography for several years, and I wasn’t able to handle it most of the time. I’m disabled and have to deal with a lot of pain, and much of the tedious procedures you have to go through to get good DSO images were just entirely too rough on me. I wound up selling all of the equipment I had spent many thousands on and retired back to the chair, watching JWST images in my screen saver! lolI had seen the smart telescopes and really wanted one, but the prices were pretty steep and I couldn’t afford them.When I recently saw this one and how small it was, I was like, nah! No way that gets good DSO shots! The aperture is entirely too small, I’ve spent more on ZWO cameras for my last telescope, and it just looked like a desktop toy! I thought about it, fought through my denial, and decided to go ahead and grab one. I mean, if it sucks, I could always return it!This did NOT suck!When it arrived, the thing was pretty much ready to go! Just pop it on the tripod, download the app, get it all connected (easy least!), and start sky watching! I seriously couldn’t believe how easy it was to get going! With my old 8” telescope and the go to alt-azm mount, it took me forever and a day to get it polar aligned! And even then, I punched in an object only to have it go towards the object, and I was still searching! If you’re trying to find some of the dimmer galaxies or nebula, you’re screwed! This thing connects to gps, and as soon as it starts up, it’s pretty much set up and ready to go! I did have to turn the entire unit around twice for it to calibrate, but dayumn! The worse thing that can happen there is that I’d get a little dizzy from spinning my old @$$ around! lolI immediately took some shots of the sun with the included solar filter, and was amazed at what I was able to see! I had never seen solar flares and sunspots that weren’t someone else’s pictures, and that was pretty cool for me!I haven’t tried it at night yet, but that’s due to an issue pretty much every telescope has: The Telescope Curse!Yes, the evil curse nearly everyone has when they buy a telescope! You’ll have clear skies for a month straight, and the local weather stations are reporting clear skies for the next 10 days! But they don’t include: “Unless you just purchased a telescope.”It has been almost a month now, and the skies have been mostly cloudy, to fully cloudy every night! Happened when I bought my last telescope and the one before that. Took almost 6 months to have an ideal night last time, and I’m praying it won’t be that long with this one!Anyway, this is a great little telescope that’s very well built, and works very well! I highly recommend it!!

Compass adjustment takes less than a minute, and by using a supplemental 3-point level attached between the tripod and Seestar S50, leveĺing is done in just a few minutes, and the Seestar is ready to find objects. If you first direct the Seestar to find a particular star, horizon calibration is automatically done. I also use a supplemental dew shield to cut down on any external side light (from street lights or the moon).Now choose from among an internal catalog of hundreds of objects.When the Seestar arrived, I spent the next couple of days learning its various menus and operations inside my house, and practicing calibration techniques. I took the Seestar out just before sunset on the third day.Within 1 hour after sunset my first object was Antares, a 3 minute total exposure, using 10 second stacked frames. Then I moved 3 minute exposures of the nearby globular cluster M80 (which resolved into dozens of stars) and magnitude 9.8 comet Olbers.I finished with my main task, a 20 minute exposure of comet Tsushinchan-ATLAS. The image filled the frame, with the main dust tail going up and the fainter anti-tail going down. The comet's head was brilliant white.Though I am extremely happy with Seestar's final internally processed image of the comet, I also did external processing on my Windows 10 computer, using the free programs GraXpert and Siril. A lot of extra detail was brought out with this.The Seestar, it's tripod, the supplemental leveler and dew shield, and the USB cable all fit into the carrying case.At about $500, the Seestar S50 is well worth it!

Great solid pice of electronics and optics!!! Loooove it!!!

I absolutely LOVE this telescope!!Exactly as advertised. Easy to use. There’s literally no set up other than opening the tripod, leveling the tripod with its built-in leveler, screwing on the telescope to the tripod, connecting the telescope to your app, an in selecting an object you want to look at and hit “go”. It is that easy. I was looking at the sun through this telescope and the solar filter that comes with it within 10 minutes of having this telescope land on my doorstep. I can’t wait to use this at night time!! I will post more later as I go. I am super happy!

After having spent thousands on telescopes over the years and not being able to track or image anything very well I had almost no faith that this thing would live up to the hype. But I figured it wasn't a whole lot of money to risk. Wow! What a surprise. It took maybe ten minutes to figure out and on the first night I produced some incredible images of the Orion Nebula, Andromeda and that comet. Well worth the money. I can't wait to get the s30 as well. Awesome performance, easy to use. You don't have to know a thing about astronomy or astrophotography but even if you do, you'll be very impressed. Solid 5 stars.