Test Driving the Seestar S50

For a while now I’ve had mixed feelings about the new generation of “smart telescopes.” On one hand, they make astrophotography astonishingly easy - almost too easy. On the other, they lack that soulful connection you get when you lean into an eyepiece and let ancient photons fall directly onto your retina. I’ve written about this tension before.

So when the Howard Astronomical League set up a Seestar S50 loaner program, I finally got around to signing up. Curiosity won out. I wanted to see whether this little automated wonder would feel like a shortcut or a revelation.

Unpacking the Little Robot

The club keeps the Seestar neatly packed in a compact carrying case, along with a sturdy tripod that’s a major upgrade from the tiny one ZWO ships with the unit. They also included a micro–leveler, a excellent addition that makes fine-tuning the setup much easier and helps ensure accurate tracking and plate solving.

Before my first night out, I watched a few tutorial videos and ran through the pre-flight checklist: compass calibration, app installation, all the usual rituals of modern astronomy.

Field Test: Suburbia vs. 10-Second Exposures

All my testing happened in my Towson backyard, which sits squarely in Bortle 8 territory. If the Seestar could perform here, it likely could perform anywhere. I spent some time scouting the darkest corners of the yard, trying to dodge the neighbor’s floodlight on one side and a porchlight on the other.

My first clear night came on November 23rd in the form of a crisp, 40° temps under clear skies, well suited for a trial run.

The app interface took a little getting used to. At first I kept losing track of how to return to the live stacking view, but after a few minutes the layout started to make sense. Once leveled, the Seestar slewed to my first target: M1, the Crab Nebula.

And then the magic happened.

Within a couple of 10-second exposures, a ghostly patch appeared on the screen — unmistakably the Crab. The Seestar had nailed the target on the first try. I left it running while I went inside to warm up and watch TV. When I returned before bed, it had quietly accumulated more than 90 minutes of data. The live-stacked image already showed color and the classic filamentary tendrils. A bit of elementary post-processing the next day produced a genuinely respectable image.

Not bad for a telescope the size of a thermos.

Chasing the Pleiades

Another target I absolutely wanted to test was M45, to see whether the Seestar could pull out the delicate blue reflection nebulosity around the cluster. I used the “extended field” mode, which stitches slightly offset frames to widen the field of view – a clever trick for large objects.

It worked far better than I expected. After 75 minutes, the Merope Nebula was clearly visible, and the whole frame had that soft, ethereal glow that makes the Pleiades so arresting in appearance. A little post-processing turned it into another keeper.

A Productive Two Months

Over roughly eight weeks, I captured:

• M1 (Crab Nebula)
• M38
• The Owl Cluster
• M42
• NGC 1055
• NGC 2403

Each target reinforced the same impression: the Seestar is remarkably capable for its size and price.

Where the Seestar Stumbles

As much as I enjoyed using it, the experience wasn’t flawless.

• Forced firmware updates: One night I had to wait for an update with no option to defer. At a dark-sky site, that would be maddening.
• Wi-Fi frustrations: Despite tutorials and configuring the required low-bandwidth network, I never managed to get the Seestar to connect through my home Wi-Fi. Being able to run it from the comfort of my bedroom would have been amazing.
• Occasional boot hiccups: A few times the unit simply wouldn’t connect to the iPad until I restarted it.
• Wind sensitivity: Even with the sturdy tripod, a mildly breezy night caused enough buffeting that the Seestar rejected a large fraction of frames, causing me to abandon the imaging run.
• Limited focal length: At 250mm, it excels at wide-field star clusters and large, bright nebulae, but for targeting the multitude of planetary nebulae or quirky galaxies (some of the object I love most) there just isn’t enough magnification there to get the job done.

Verdict: A Keeper (Just Not My Keeper… Yet)

The Seestar S50 won me over. It won’t replace my Vixen and ASI2600 for deep, detailed imaging, but it’s a delightful, capable, and genuinely fun piece of gear. The ability to set it up, walk away, and come back to a finished stack is liberating. I can easily imagine running a Seestar in the backyard on a DSO while I’m out front lucky-imaging a planet.

If ZWO ever releases a version with a longer focal length – or the ability to insert something like a 2× Barlow – I’d be seriously tempted. For now, I’ll happily borrow the HAL unit again this summer and see what else this little robot can do.

Tovala Telescopes?

Did you feel the amateur astronomy ground shift under your feet last year? While in the making for decades, AI exploded and took center stage in 2023 with the promise (or threat) of doing things for us. And while we have had "smart telescopes" such as the Unistellar eVscope since about 2020, the entry of products such as ZWO's SeeStar and Dwarf2 with a much more affordable price point of about $500 promises to be a game changer to our hobby. 

For those unfamiliar with these instruments, they abstract away most of the challenges in acquiring images of deep sky objects. Their refractor design means no worries collimating anything, and their stacking using short ~10-second captures means minimal tracking snafus. Plate-solving ensures your target is centered in the field. Polar alignment isn't required. It seems the most challenging part is just getting the unit level. The end result is that what used to be a significant threshold in terms of time and money to produce beautiful images of deep space objects has been dramatically lowered. And for those who want to refine the tiny scope's output there's the potential to download the individual subs to play with in your favorite photo processing software. The outcome - as seen here in this example from a photo Ken Sall forwarded from a FB group - is pretty astounding. 

I always grow a bit philosophical when confronted by these sort of advancements to our hobby and their impact. Progress is inevitable (especially if a profit is to be had) and often a boon to us. GoTo technology allows one to be far more efficient in an observing session and obviates the need to employ star-hoping skills. And who would want to go back to capturing photons on film save for the nostalgia of it? (I can smell the pungent aroma of the darkroom's stop-bath  as I typed that...)

And yet - does this sort of quantum leap remove some of the essence of why we take those photos? What is it that pulls us out under the stars in the first place? One approach to answering that question might be to consider Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in which the 20th century psychologist postulated what makes us tick. The hierarchy is often shown as a pyramid in which a person works their way up from the bottom towards the top. The base of the pyramid deals with one's physical needs - food, shelter, safety. Once those are met we are free to move higher up to psychological needs of friendships and esteem. At the pyramid's pinnacle we have creative activities. Certainly it is in those areas that we find the impetus for people joining our hobby. 

Like most hobbies, astronomy certainly offers the opportunity for community and friendships that often accompany it. That is the raison d'etre for HAL. And, at the moment at least, there is a bond among SeeStar owners as they share their experiences using the scope that isn't seen for most other types of scopes. 

But how do the EAA telescopes fare in terms of fulfilling the esteem and creativity motivators within us? Their popularity would argue they indeed can provide their owners with a sense of pride and spirit of creativity as they image the wonders of the universe. That image of M42 demonstrates that. But over the long haul will that hold up? Those who delve into the processing of the little scope's stack of images to enhance and amplify the resulting photograph will likely continue to have those esteem and creative itches scratched. But for the person whose input is mostly just telling the machine what to target, I suspect that their initial psychological rewards will fade once the sky has done a full turn. Will we see a plethora of eBay listings of these scopes in a couple years?

There is another aspect that is, to me, a little unsettling. How ironic that a telescope calling itself SeeStar actually doesn't allow you to peer through it! There is a wonderful sense of awe peering through the eyepiece at the universe. Some targets, such as Saturn, need no introduction and can become an experience you'll always remember. Others, like seeing the stellar point of light at the center of galaxy M77 and knowing it represents an active galactic nucleus powered by a black hole, are more subtle but just as profound. Many of us also delight in the success of catching a glimpse of a challenging object such as discerning the active star forming region NGC 604 within the Triangulum galaxy or sleuthing out which faint star is actually distant Pluto. I suspect that we can thank another form of progress - light pollution - for the making such things more difficult and fueling our desire to swap out our eyes for the CMOS photon sponges.

All this being said, I need to disclose I've never used one of these scopes - perhaps I'd become their evangelist upon using one! I do sincerely hope that they bring hours of enjoyment to their owners and help grow the ranks of our amateur astronomy community. In our recent HAL board meetings discussing whether we should acquire a unit for club use, I was a solid "aye" vote in the matter (and my thanks to Grace Coventry for her efforts on making that a reality for us). If EAA entices people away from mindless scrolling on social media and brings them out under the night sky for a semi-virtual exploration of the heavens, then it is a huge win - not only for the hobby but for that individual as well.