I have a Dwarflab DWARF 3 (also mentioned in the post) that I highly recommend. It’s one of those gadgets that ended up using more than expected when I bought it. I toss it in my luggage and I got to capture really nice sky pictures with little effort (Marfa TX, Patagonia, latest total solar eclipse in Spain)
I'm interested in your eclipse experience. I tried capturing totality with a seestar S50 back in the 2024 eclipse. What I found is that at the very moment of totality, I had not removed the solar filter fast enough, and the bloody thing lost lock on tracking the Sun. Rather than fiddling with the equipment, I immediately started to ignore the 'scope and just experienced the eclipse.
That was the right thing to do!
But removing the solar filter right at the moment of totality is such an edge case (both for the software and my wetware which was kind of overwhelmed) that I wonder how others dealt with it?
I was capturing video and removed the magnetic solar filter as quick and carefully as I could. It worked but didn’t love the results. Hard to not move the telescope a bit that causes realignment and then obviously it has to readjust exposure that takes a moment. Same when putting it back after totality. I’m also looking for advice. We have another chance next year in Spain!
Yes indeed! Spain, next year! (And Australia, the year after that! ;-) )
I'm also wondering about the feasibility of taking these gizmos on airplanes, what with the Lithium battery packs, etc.
What we really need (for some definition of need) is a robot-filter-remover, timed to deal with the two critical times (first and last instant of totality; 2nd and 3rd contacts from memory). Anybody out there interested in building something like that? It would be purely a passion project, because it could only be used a few times a decade...
I’ve flown with it a handful of times without issue. Both in cabin luggage and checked in but I guess I’m risking it in the latter.
Not sure how a robot filter remover would work on the DWARF 3 that is reliable and works around loss of alignment and the exposure adjustment. I would love to find a solution for next year. Also wonder how can one test it out beforehand. I don’t want to burn the sensor ha ha
If you are buying think through whether you want a wider field of view (S30 series) or more details (S50 series). S30 might be a better bet for amateur viewing.
When I bought my telescope, there was a dedicated physical brick&mortar store with knowledgeable people on staff. I had done a little browsing online to get an idea, but it was the staff that really sold me. The very first question I was asked on what I primarily wanted to view with the telescope: solar system bodies or deep sky objects. I chose wide field for DSOs. Sadly, that store closed about a year after my purchase.
Saying all that to expand on how the wide field or not is an important decision. If you primarily think of a telescope giving detailed magnified views of the moon or similar, then you will not be happy with a wide field regardless of how powerful of an eyepiece you use.
Thank you for the reply. Yes, I learned what I had to learn from going to astronomy gatherings and absorbing what the folks worked with. A store like what you describe would be awesome in today's day and age.
On a side note, I have an 8'' dobsonian and people think I might be getting magnified views of DSOs with that by default. I have to explain about eyepieces to them to clear that out.
The price of the telescope + mount is just the tip of the iceberg. Eyepieces are fine pieces of lenses and are priced accordingly. They are no different in practice than the lens of a camera which might make their prices more relatable. The tube is just collecting light, but the eyepiece determines what makes it to your eye with what level of maginification. Just stating all of this for others that might just be starting to consider a telescope. I have not invested in eyepieces as I bought the telescope for prime photography.
It’s not bad, but does start sounding like AI if you’re familiar with their writing style:
> Gradient correction. Noise reduction. Separating stars and nebula. Stretching the faint structures carefully. Working on contrast and colour. Putting everything back together.
A small piece of feedback: it is a really interesting article, but also quite grating to read. I'm guessing you used AI to review/edit, and it seems to have added a lot of filler and coated the piece with its own writing style.
There is something fundamentally different about actually looking at Jupiter... The image might be faint, imperfect ... But it is live.
The astrophotography/live viewing split in astronomy is interesting. For me, the whole reason I do backyard astronomy is to find the objects myself and observe directly, to the point where even using an app like Stellarium feels a bit like cheating.
> How does one locate Saturn in the night sky without an electronic aid?
Seriously?
You mean that _really_ bright star that is out of place on your constellation map / planisphere?
It's a planet.
Look at it and see which one it is. (BTW: Look at it a few nights later as it moves to work out its trajectory. Congratulations, you can now identify which planet it is anytime, no telescope needed.)
SERIOUSLY?! You'd be surprised how few people know you can easily spot planets with the naked eye, in addition to many other little interesting things in life. You react as if he didn't know how to his shoes.
You'll get a better result if you put in your actual location, but whatever. Looks like Saturn is visible this time of year, and will be in the east around midnight. You can check this right now and it'll be about right for the next few weeks. You can step the time forward and see what how the planets move over time.
If you don't do the above steps, you could probably make a guess, as the planets are the brightest objects in the sky, easily seen by eye.
Then you point your telescope at it. I found mine in the trash and it didn't come with the spotting scope, so I kind of just have to guess where to point it. Use your widest angle lens, and move the scope around until you see something bright go by. You're close! Then you center the bright thing in the center of the view, and after the scope stops shaking because it's on a cheap tripod, you can see a very tiny Saturn, including the rings. Then you swap the lens for a more zoomed in one to see it better. The rotation of the earth means it will quickly drift out of view, so you have to constantly adjust your scope every minute or so to keep it in frame, until I fix the motor that came with my equatorial mount which is supposed to do this part for you.
Yeah, and there is no pleasure reading this. It's way too long and verbose for what it's trying to say. I'd much rather read the prompt, in bullet points or whatever format they were provided before inflating a few example pictures and notes into a short novel
How is this criticism not just ad hominem slop? You could have said "It's way too long and verbose for what it's trying to say". The writer is orthogonal.
Maybe I’m a Luddite but I find AI prose completely tiresome to read, and its presence in an article forces me to be skeptical about whatever the author wrote. The latter was obviously a problem pre-AI but these tools simply make it much easier to tell stories, narratives, etc. that aren’t yours.
Yup, exactly what I noticed. And I do think the content is really cool but the writing, the section titles, the entire site design, it all reminds me of ai :(
Not to say anything negative about the author though, im sure this took a long time to put together whether it was written with ai or not. But I definitely noticed those ai-isms
Absolutely, and I highly recommend starting that way. The comparison was meant against building up a photography rig with similar capabilities. Even with used components, it's gonna be hard to get into this price range.
I've never done this, but I suspect it will be like pretty much every other DIY project. It looks like it could be cheaper at first, but in the end turns out to be more expensive than projected for any of the reasons DIY projects end up like that.
I've been slowly (slowly....) working on an open source version of what the Seestar provides - a 3D printable shell, easily sourced mechanics and optics, open source electronics (3D printer controller boards are fabulous here). I love the idea of smart telescopes, but I also hope and believe that someday we'll have an open source equivalent to the easy entrypoint of, say, the S30.
Maybe I'm being too much of a purist because late model smart telescopes now allow you to grab the raw FITS files so the relative value of a fully open ecosystem is lower, but I'm trying to build towards the motivated teenager segment: someone who maybe has a Seestar or has seen one, and wants to have that experience, but wants to own it themselves and actually understand what's happening. I have the mechanics mostly working in Alt-Az mode, EQ mode is currently accomplished using a hinged plywood board fashioned into the world's shittiest polar alignment wedge, and now I'm working on figuring out how/where to source good enough optics. I have already learned a whack-ton designing the thing, and I hope that in the future the build will be interesting and informative enough for others to get a bunch of experience in Astrophotography for very little money.
You can buy the sensors used in a lot of these telescopes for <50USD on Aliexpress, the drive mechanics and electronics are ~80, and then all you should need (hopefully) is a cheapo Raspberry Pi 3 or equivalent, putting the total BOM at under 200 bucks. I'm hoping that by early next year I'll have something presentable and we can start building an open source ecosystem to compete with these very impressive but very heavily integrated instruments.
It’s curious that this doesn’t exist really. All the components are there, location via GPS, the tracking mechanics are not particularly difficult once you know the orientation, and there are good open plate solvers.
Maybe good sensors suddenly became cheaper? Willingness to put a real computer in the control system? For a long time even potato quality CCDs were expensive and handset electronics have been awful.
How hard would it be to do the opposite? point a camera at the stars in multiple directions, recognise the angle of various constellations, and use that to work out your location?
Easy enough, since this is how celestial navigation works, especially as we have very accurate clocks. You can get latitude from image declination and longitude from time, provided your clock is set from a good reference. In theory you only need one image pointed straight up to estimate declination. You’ll probably have an uncertainty on the order of miles.
Ooh great timing! I've been working on a custom firmware replacement (Yocto base) + FOSS control app for existing smart telescopes with plans to release a beta in the next month or so. Currently I'm building out Support for the ZWO Seestars, Dwarf Mini/II/III, Vaonis Vespera, and Unistellar Odyssey (this one's very WIP though). Also working on a nice HAL and plugin system to make porting the CFW to new devices as simple as possible. To tie it all together the firmware also has an Alpaca server running on it.
Currently the state of software development for these smart scopes are...not good. I even wrote about the issues years ago when I "jailbroke" my Seestar S50[1]. With a proper open source solution + better quality gates, it's finally turning into something usable for us power users. I'll give ZWO credit for one thing though, at least they themselves finally admitted defeat and added native Alpaca support in the end.
If you do release your open source Seestar alternative, let me know and I'll write a HAL driver for it.
So like others in this thread, I bought a used telescope, a 8" Dobsonian in my case, and it's absolutely massive, like 5 feet tall. Totally different than this SeeStar. And I don't see things like the photos in this article through my telescope. Those nebulas? No way.
So I have to ask - am I getting a more "genuine" viewing experiencing? Are stacking and perhaps AI enhancements reflecting the real night sky? Or is SeeStar/iPhone/Pixel output drifting more towards generative art?
The main problem here is - purely visual, you will have a very hard time seeing galaxies and pretty much no chance of seeing nebulae, specially in color. The objects are pretty faint and at best, you will see a milky smush. Those nebulae I capture send out light in wavelengths not visible to the human eye, so you'll have no chance of seeing them live.
There are some night-vision eyepieces which boost contrast and lightness - really cool but also pretty expansive.
> am I getting a more "genuine" viewing experiencing?
That's a nearly philosophical question and the answer is yes and no. You will be able to see object you normally would not and the image you get is correct in the way that colors for example represent certain gases, so they are not fake, but also not realistic in the way of how you would see it with your naked eye.
Looking directly through? Or taking photos through?
With photos you can have a longer exposure and see things too faint for the naked eye, not just too small. I'd guess that's what's happening here. You could very probably blow this smart cam out of the water with pictures taken through your telescope. Especially if you can have it track whatever you're shooting to allow very long exposures
Unfortunately your eyes cannot integrate light for 10 or 20 seconds. The pictures you see are stacking several pictures, each several seconds long. Then there is the astrophotography processing with darks, offsets and flatfields. And to finish some classical photoshop-like processing to make the contrast and the colors pop
That's weird, I'm following only 4 or 5 amateur astronomy youtube channels but they all published at least one video of the exact telescope over the last days
How weird. It's almost as if 90% of amateur anything Youtube channels are actually advertisement businesses pushing the sponsored product of the day on their audiences. So weird.
I already knew what telescope this was before I clicked the link. I've had one for a few years now. It's an awesome tool that has improved over time. You can leave it out all night now if you want and program a schedule.
I have a high-end rig and this one. I use this one way more frequently due to the simplicity of the setup. You are capturing light in no time and it does not weight a ton. As long as you are conscious about its limitations, it’s a fun gizmo if you like astronomy or enjoy astrophotography.
If I understand correctly, this is only used for astrophotography? You can't actually view through it with your bare eyes? That, to me, was the main reason to buy a reflector/refractor telescope; to receive the actual light of a planet (okay actually the suns light bouncing off the planet) bouncing through a bunch of mirrors, lenses and eyepieces back into your own eyes. The first time finding and seeing Saturn and Jupiter with my own eyes was amazing.
That’s correct. But don’t let that put you off. They’re simply for different things!
I have both an S30 Pro and an 8” motorized SCT. The wow factor of a real scope is not lost, I can assure you.
But I don’t take my big telescope camping, for example. It’s too big and awkward. The Seestar fits in a backpack, and spits out beautiful galaxy photos to use as phone wallpapers. I just leave it running all evening. It’s very neat.
> The telescope works out where it is, finds the target, tracks it and starts collecting images. A few minutes later, something appears on the screen that clearly is the nebula, galaxy or star cluster you selected. And importantly: it is your image.
Idk, to me this feels like I'd be so removed from the entire process that it doesn't feel like it is my image anymore.
Somewhat poor analogy, but these smart telescopes feel similar to bringing in CNC center for someone enjoying woodworking. Sure, it might be very efficient in manufacturing the end result and it is kinda neat that there are cheap options from china available. But it also removes the whole enjoyment of the craft, working with hand tools and what not.
There tend to be two kinds of people, those who value the journey and those who value the product. This telescope is aimed more at those who value the product, and hand tool woodworking is probably more for those who value the journey. You would want a telescope that lets you value the journey
Ok, tell me then how exactly can I "not read it" when it's NOT disclosed?
The subject interests me so I'm beginning to read, only to waste minutes of my precious life on realising this is another long-winded slop. How should I avoid that?
I was looking at the prices of a Schmidt-Cassegrain the other day in the hopes they had gone down since the last time I looked around 20 years ago or so. Nope. Even used is still way, way out of my budget.
I've never understood astrophotography. It's like taking pictures of the Mona Lisa with a Gameboy camera. Unlike real photography which is dynamic and ever changing, the night sky has remained the same since our ancestors first looked up.
Why not just download HD scans from the pros especially if you're going to "automate" the hobby portion of the field.
Can I just simulate the user interface a smart telescope uses and then just return Hubble photos after some artificial loading screen completes? Maybe toss in some whirring noises?
_joel | 15 hours ago
dinosaur0001 | 15 hours ago
dmarcos | 15 hours ago
fghorow | 15 hours ago
That was the right thing to do!
But removing the solar filter right at the moment of totality is such an edge case (both for the software and my wetware which was kind of overwhelmed) that I wonder how others dealt with it?
dmarcos | 15 hours ago
fghorow | 14 hours ago
I'm also wondering about the feasibility of taking these gizmos on airplanes, what with the Lithium battery packs, etc.
What we really need (for some definition of need) is a robot-filter-remover, timed to deal with the two critical times (first and last instant of totality; 2nd and 3rd contacts from memory). Anybody out there interested in building something like that? It would be purely a passion project, because it could only be used a few times a decade...
dmarcos | 14 hours ago
Not sure how a robot filter remover would work on the DWARF 3 that is reliable and works around loss of alignment and the exposure adjustment. I would love to find a solution for next year. Also wonder how can one test it out beforehand. I don’t want to burn the sensor ha ha
fghorow | 14 hours ago
Also, I just found this (total hack, but cool)! [1]
[1] https://github.com/nsuan/TelescopeFilter
0xcafecafe | 15 hours ago
dylan604 | 14 hours ago
Saying all that to expand on how the wide field or not is an important decision. If you primarily think of a telescope giving detailed magnified views of the moon or similar, then you will not be happy with a wide field regardless of how powerful of an eyepiece you use.
0xcafecafe | 11 hours ago
On a side note, I have an 8'' dobsonian and people think I might be getting magnified views of DSOs with that by default. I have to explain about eyepieces to them to clear that out.
dylan604 | 11 hours ago
adfr | 15 hours ago
ralfd | 15 hours ago
adfr | 15 hours ago
Aachen | 15 hours ago
skybrian | 14 hours ago
> Gradient correction. Noise reduction. Separating stars and nebula. Stretching the faint structures carefully. Working on contrast and colour. Putting everything back together.
relevant_stats | 14 hours ago
ricardobeat | 15 hours ago
A small piece of feedback: it is a really interesting article, but also quite grating to read. I'm guessing you used AI to review/edit, and it seems to have added a lot of filler and coated the piece with its own writing style.
I found a pre-AI post much more pleasant to read: https://adfr.io/thoughts/20240207_time_travel
deltarholamda | 15 hours ago
zelos | 15 hours ago
The astrophotography/live viewing split in astronomy is interesting. For me, the whole reason I do backyard astronomy is to find the objects myself and observe directly, to the point where even using an app like Stellarium feels a bit like cheating.
GJim | 15 hours ago
Personally, I have no computers, phones or any electronic crap when I'm observing the sky. Just me and a manual telescope.
I look at the sky to get away from all that shite.
voidUpdate | 14 hours ago
GJim | 14 hours ago
Lets just say there is no need for a compass!
voidUpdate | 13 hours ago
GJim | 13 hours ago
Seriously?
You mean that _really_ bright star that is out of place on your constellation map / planisphere?
It's a planet.
Look at it and see which one it is. (BTW: Look at it a few nights later as it moves to work out its trajectory. Congratulations, you can now identify which planet it is anytime, no telescope needed.)
firmretention | 13 hours ago
alnwlsn | 13 hours ago
First thing to know is what there is even to look at. If you don't know anything, look here:
https://www.heavens-above.com/skychart2.aspx
You'll get a better result if you put in your actual location, but whatever. Looks like Saturn is visible this time of year, and will be in the east around midnight. You can check this right now and it'll be about right for the next few weeks. You can step the time forward and see what how the planets move over time.
If you don't do the above steps, you could probably make a guess, as the planets are the brightest objects in the sky, easily seen by eye.
Then you point your telescope at it. I found mine in the trash and it didn't come with the spotting scope, so I kind of just have to guess where to point it. Use your widest angle lens, and move the scope around until you see something bright go by. You're close! Then you center the bright thing in the center of the view, and after the scope stops shaking because it's on a cheap tripod, you can see a very tiny Saturn, including the rings. Then you swap the lens for a more zoomed in one to see it better. The rotation of the earth means it will quickly drift out of view, so you have to constantly adjust your scope every minute or so to keep it in frame, until I fix the motor that came with my equatorial mount which is supposed to do this part for you.
appleappleapple | 15 hours ago
comboy | 15 hours ago
carb | 15 hours ago
As such, you cannot be sure if the writing contains correct and accurate information at all, even with modern models.
comboy | 15 hours ago
how is that related to LLMs?
Aachen | 15 hours ago
mhb | 14 hours ago
throwawaysoxjje | 14 hours ago
mhb | 7 hours ago
appleappleapple | 15 hours ago
relevant_stats | 13 hours ago
I won't waste my time on a person who didn't bother to express themselves.
s3p | 15 hours ago
Not to say anything negative about the author though, im sure this took a long time to put together whether it was written with ai or not. But I definitely noticed those ai-isms
Tepix | 15 hours ago
Well, I bought a used 8 inch (203mm) telescope for 500€ a few years ago. Used telescopes can be very cheap.
adfr | 15 hours ago
giantg2 | 15 hours ago
dylan604 | 14 hours ago
giantg2 | 13 hours ago
BenjiWiebe | 13 hours ago
Which is fine if you want to make it yourself as part of the hobby. But if your only purpose is to save money...
dylan604 | 12 hours ago
poulpy123 | 10 hours ago
poulpy123 | 10 hours ago
gedy | 15 hours ago
They are out of stock unfortunately, though perhaps the pro is worth the higher price.
nameless912 | 15 hours ago
Maybe I'm being too much of a purist because late model smart telescopes now allow you to grab the raw FITS files so the relative value of a fully open ecosystem is lower, but I'm trying to build towards the motivated teenager segment: someone who maybe has a Seestar or has seen one, and wants to have that experience, but wants to own it themselves and actually understand what's happening. I have the mechanics mostly working in Alt-Az mode, EQ mode is currently accomplished using a hinged plywood board fashioned into the world's shittiest polar alignment wedge, and now I'm working on figuring out how/where to source good enough optics. I have already learned a whack-ton designing the thing, and I hope that in the future the build will be interesting and informative enough for others to get a bunch of experience in Astrophotography for very little money.
You can buy the sensors used in a lot of these telescopes for <50USD on Aliexpress, the drive mechanics and electronics are ~80, and then all you should need (hopefully) is a cheapo Raspberry Pi 3 or equivalent, putting the total BOM at under 200 bucks. I'm hoping that by early next year I'll have something presentable and we can start building an open source ecosystem to compete with these very impressive but very heavily integrated instruments.
abetusk | 14 hours ago
Even a BOM would be helpful. Also understanding the post-processing/cleanup step would be interesting.
throwaway219450 | 13 hours ago
Maybe good sensors suddenly became cheaper? Willingness to put a real computer in the control system? For a long time even potato quality CCDs were expensive and handset electronics have been awful.
There is https://observatorycontrolsystem.github.io/ on the scheduler side
RobotToaster | 12 hours ago
throwaway219450 | 8 hours ago
poulpy123 | 10 hours ago
joshumax | 11 hours ago
Currently the state of software development for these smart scopes are...not good. I even wrote about the issues years ago when I "jailbroke" my Seestar S50[1]. With a proper open source solution + better quality gates, it's finally turning into something usable for us power users. I'll give ZWO credit for one thing though, at least they themselves finally admitted defeat and added native Alpaca support in the end.
If you do release your open source Seestar alternative, let me know and I'll write a HAL driver for it.
1: https://www.cloudynights.com/forums/topic/900861-seestar-s50...
exhilaration | 15 hours ago
So I have to ask - am I getting a more "genuine" viewing experiencing? Are stacking and perhaps AI enhancements reflecting the real night sky? Or is SeeStar/iPhone/Pixel output drifting more towards generative art?
adfr | 15 hours ago
There are some night-vision eyepieces which boost contrast and lightness - really cool but also pretty expansive.
> am I getting a more "genuine" viewing experiencing? That's a nearly philosophical question and the answer is yes and no. You will be able to see object you normally would not and the image you get is correct in the way that colors for example represent certain gases, so they are not fake, but also not realistic in the way of how you would see it with your naked eye.
zelos | 14 hours ago
With an 8 inch dob, things like globular clusters are going to look granular and pretty amazing in reasonably dark skies. Similar for bright nebula.
But, yes, it's a philosophical question.
dmbche | 15 hours ago
With photos you can have a longer exposure and see things too faint for the naked eye, not just too small. I'd guess that's what's happening here. You could very probably blow this smart cam out of the water with pictures taken through your telescope. Especially if you can have it track whatever you're shooting to allow very long exposures
poulpy123 | 10 hours ago
pu_pe | 15 hours ago
poulpy123 | 15 hours ago
avian | 15 hours ago
testickle | 14 hours ago
cuasijoe | 14 hours ago
benmorris | 15 hours ago
cuasijoe | 14 hours ago
HelloUsername | 14 hours ago
elliottkember | 10 hours ago
I have both an S30 Pro and an 8” motorized SCT. The wow factor of a real scope is not lost, I can assure you.
But I don’t take my big telescope camping, for example. It’s too big and awkward. The Seestar fits in a backpack, and spits out beautiful galaxy photos to use as phone wallpapers. I just leave it running all evening. It’s very neat.
throw0101d | 14 hours ago
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYJwgEwxG-U
If you want to get into astronomy, he has a few good beginner advice videos:
* 101 books/binoculars/telescopes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IlmekWsEAQ
* some more books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhbAEx2le7o
zokier | 14 hours ago
Idk, to me this feels like I'd be so removed from the entire process that it doesn't feel like it is my image anymore.
Somewhat poor analogy, but these smart telescopes feel similar to bringing in CNC center for someone enjoying woodworking. Sure, it might be very efficient in manufacturing the end result and it is kinda neat that there are cheap options from china available. But it also removes the whole enjoyment of the craft, working with hand tools and what not.
voidUpdate | 14 hours ago
mhb | 7 hours ago
relevant_stats | 14 hours ago
newtonianrules | 12 hours ago
relevant_stats | 12 hours ago
The subject interests me so I'm beginning to read, only to waste minutes of my precious life on realising this is another long-winded slop. How should I avoid that?
mhb | 7 hours ago
thataccount | 13 hours ago
commieneko | 11 hours ago
https://www.cloudynights.com/forums/topic/1000995-miniature-...
thallium205 | 9 hours ago
Why not just download HD scans from the pros especially if you're going to "automate" the hobby portion of the field.
Can I just simulate the user interface a smart telescope uses and then just return Hubble photos after some artificial loading screen completes? Maybe toss in some whirring noises?