ZWO Seestar S50 Astronomical All-in-one Smart Telescope

This telescope is mind blowing! So easy to get started and take amazing photos right away. The attached photos were taken within half an hour of setting this up.

Such an incredible tool, and so easy to use. You can be doing amazing astrophotography within literally minutes of opening the package. Some feedback for ZWO: 1. The EQ wedge is flimsy - you’re trying to adapt a designed for small cameras to a heavy, constantly-moving scope. Use a sturdy wedfe instead. The design of the SeeStar’s base means you can’t just pop it onto the tripod or wedge you have for any other telescope, which is a shame. The end result is that EQ Mode is unusable, which means you are limited to 10-second exposures. This is the main thing that keeps this scope from being a serious observational tool. 2. The app needs far more functionality around importing and exporting plans. Creating a plan in the app is a nightmare. Remove the AI garbage you added and focus on real features. 3. The scope is good for lunar and deep sky observations, but is not fit for purpose for planetary observations. And that’s fine. Just don’t advertise that it can do things it’s not designed for.

A game changer in astrophotography! No more setting up a "Go-To" German Equatorial powered tripod, Apochromatic refractor, digital camera and laptop. It took 30 minutes from unpacking the box to taking deep sky photos! This Seestar Telescope is perfect for beginners. This will not out-perform serious astrophotographers with their equipment. But for great wide field photos when you want to have some fun, this is perfect. For serious amateur astronomers, think of the Seestar S50 as the perfect traveling companion, just like the Orion 4.5" Starblast...most astronomers have a secondary small quick set-up Telescope. But the Seestar S50 is also the perfect Telescope for people who love astronomy and want to do a little astrophotography. This opens up opportunities for deep-sky observing that beginners would never pursue on their own. So basically anyone can view and take photos of our universe the first night out. The entire Telescope, case and tripod is not much bigger than a shoebox. A quality piece of equipment! Kim Kenny - Crewe Observatory

This is an incredible product. The images it creates are just unbelievable. I live in a very cloudy part of Colombia and at times it even is able to get through the haze of a cloud layer to make good images. If I still lived in Arizona, this would even be better. I highly recommend this product to anybody who is interested in incredible photography.

For the money, IMHO this is the best budget smart telescope at this time. Expect the market to have more options in the future, but I am enjoying astrophotography NOW. Easy to use and all you need is a good photo processing software to enhance exposure, contrast, reduce noise, image sharpening and color. In auto mode, the S50 will find, center and auto focus on the deep space object you select from the Seestar S50 app (free download) menu. However, you also have the option to find, focus and take pictures of objects manually whether it be astro or just landscape including wildlife.

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! lol I 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! lol I 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!!

Was not sure about this telescope. But after watching and reading many reviews, it seemed to be exactly what I wanted. It is light and very transportable, much more than my old 8” Celestron SC back in the 90’s! It is the easiest to use telescope I have ever seen. Once the scope is leveled, you do not need to touch it. Everything is done on the app, which is also very well designed and easy to use. I am very happy with it now just need more clear nights!

I purchased this because I was under the impression that I can see incredible visuals of the galaxies AND as a telescope. Well if you live near the shore or at lower elevations, this won't work! First, it took me a while before I can even operate it because it works solely on your smart phone (I purchased a laptop to use with this while waiting for it to arrive, obviously not knowing that). It came but I couldn't open it for a bit because of personal matters that needed tending to (I was hospitalized) BUT about two weeks later I opened it and read the manual. I couldn't wait to use it, since my Orion telescope was too heavy to lug around anymore along with my case of lenses. It states that you have to use your phone only for it so with that, and with the storage that was needed to run it, made me to have to delete over 7 apps to make enough space (NOT happy with that)! Then approx another week goes by and I can finally start to use it! I have, at this time of year, the Andromeda galaxy right above me. I select that galaxy to look up and it does find it! It can be fine tuned to get a better visual but NOT as advertised, which was def disappointing. That entire ordeal took a long time to accomplish due to it being winter, I packed it up and figured I'd try again the next night to look at other things. Due to rain, I got back to it and few days later. Next time comes and now I want to just explore without looking at the built in galaxies. It was a crystal clear night, several planets were clearly visible so I wanted to just look around and find constellations and planets on my own. Well it kept coming back with the response, something along the lines of; there's not enough stars to view, which made zero sense since there were 100's of them out and the night couldn't be any clearer! I was so extremely disappointed!! So if you all want to spend over $500+ dollars on something that you can easily sit back and visualize yourself on your phone or computer for FREE? Go for it!! I then went through the steps to return it and apparently I was several days too late to do it through Amazon BUT I was given a suggestion to reach out to the seller and see if they would accept the return. That was about 3 or 4 days ago with still NO response! This is NOT what they advertise sooo save your money folks!! It's garbage!!