Seestar S30 Pro Smart Telescope

I am admittedly a true amateur astronomer. After a few weeks of trial, and more than a few tutorials, I have finally begun to see the truly brilliant results from my Seestar S30 Pro

My first impressions of this scope is that it’s an amazingly wonderful instrument! I’ve been wanting to get into Astro photography for years, and the set ups are always complicated and expensive and not justifiable in an area like Seattle where we seldom have clear skies even in the summer when we’ve been lately suffering from forest fire, smoke haze during the best summer observing times . I thought of waiting for the new telescope due in January but I thought heck it’s sunny now, and it should be sunny this fall due to El Niño. So I went ahead and ordered the S3 pro. There are a few improvements in the software that could be done such as larger icons on the right with a little bit more contrast as well. I’m 70 years old in my eyes and it’s good as they are especially in low light conditions and so that would be the only improvement immediately. The imagery that I’ve seen, as well as the first few images that I’ve done of the deep sky revealed to me that this telescope is as capable as the large astronomical telescopes such as Mount Palomar 200 inch back in the day when they were limited to film. I did one 42 minute exposure of a random spot in the sky near the dipper end of the little dipper. It’s nice to see the colors of red giant, as well as intensely blue stars and yellows. I’m still learning on how to point it to Polaris and perhaps shouldn’t sit in on top of the metal box that I used to store all my lithium batteries in outside. I’m really looking forward to exploring with a scope and as far as trying to fit a Dobson or any other scope or using my Nikon cameras damage the night sky, why bother when this is so much better!

I’ve only had this a few days and so far have only been able to sun images due to weather but overall I found the scope easy set up and connect to. Had some problem calibrating the compass but when I moved it off of a metal table it worked perfectly. Included manual dies not have a lot of information but the one online is more detailed with examples. Looking forward to better weather conditions.