With warmer summer nights creating perfect conditions for stargazing, now is an excellent time to invest in a telescope.

We are now into the final hours of Amazon’s four-day Prime sale, though, and the deals are set to end at midnight BST. If you have been waiting to buy a scope for exploring the night sky, this is your last chance to act before prices return to normal and the best discounts disappear.

• See all of today's Amazon camera deals

🇺🇸 Telescope deals in USA

Top US retailers:

🇺🇸 Amazon: Cheap prices on camera gear
🇺🇸 Adorama: Big discounts on cameras and tech
🇺🇸 Walmart: DSLR, Mirrorless & action cameras
🇺🇸 B&H Photo Video: Deals on camera brands
🇺🇸 Best Buy: Save on TVs, laptops, appliances
🇺🇸 Unistellar: Smart telescopes direct from the makers

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🇬🇧 Telescope deals in the UK

🇬🇧 Amazon: Cheap prices on camera gear
🇬🇧 Unistellar: Save up to £800 on smart telescopes
🇬🇧 John Lewis: The best for electrical deals
🇬🇧 Jessops: Deals from an iconic camera store
🇬🇧 Park Cameras: Top camera & lens prices
🇬🇧 Wex Photo Video: Great deals on the latest kit
🇬🇧 Very: Telescopes, GoPros, Canon cameras
🇬🇧 Clifton Cameras: Celestron telescope specialists

Check out our guides to the best telescopes, and to the best smart telescopes

If you’ve been thinking about exploring astrophotography but are put off by the expense — and the usual requirement for telescopes, tracking mounts, cameras and laptops — the ZWO Seestar S30 Pro smart telescope may be exactly what you’re looking for.

Small enough to sit comfortably in a camera backpack alongside a mirrorless body and a couple of lenses, the Seestar S30 Pro is closer in size to a chunky telephoto lens than a traditional telescope — but nowhere near as heavy.

Designed by Chinese imaging specialist ZWO, which has been making a name for itself in astrophotography accessories, the S30 Pro is an upgraded version of the original Seestar S30. Conceptually, they’re identical. Once powered on and connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth and WiFi, it automatically aligns itself to the night sky as it slews to your chosen celestial object, captures a series of exposures and stacks them to create colorful images — from galaxies, nebulae and star clusters to the moon and even the sun.

What makes the Pro model interesting for astrophotographers is its upgraded imaging system. While the original Seestar S30 used a 2MP Sony IMX662 sensor for Full HD resolution images, the S30 Pro introduces larger Sony IMX585 and Sony IMX586 sensors — both capable of capturing 8.3MP 4K images — for telephoto and wide-field imaging, respectively. That’s a big leap in detail — and there’s more. It’s also got an equatorial mode that puts the ‘scope in sync with Earth’s rotation, enabling longer exposures.

Although it requires an equatorial wedge ball head and polar-aligning, together with the jump in resolution, it helps make the Seestar S30 Pro the first pro-level portable smart telescope.

Specifications

Price & availability

ZWO’s Seestar concept was the first entry-level smart telescope to catch the zeitgeist with the release of the Seestar S50 in 2023. The more portable Seestar S30, priced around UK£419/US$399/AU$699, quickly became one of the most affordable smart telescopes available when it was released in 2025.

The Seestar S30 Pro is an effort to keep the same form factor but slightly upgrade the experience, with new sensors and improved resolution responsible for an uptick in price to US$599/£599/AU$820.

For astrophotographers who care about resolution and post-processing potential, the upgrade from a full HD sensor in the S30 to 4K sensors in the S30 Pro makes the latter far more appealing.

Build and handling

The Seestar S30 Pro is remarkably portable. Its compact design means it can easily fit inside most camera backpacks — something that would have been unthinkable for traditional astrophotography setups — though its carry case also comes with a shoulder strap.

Build quality is solid rather than luxurious. The main body uses a tough white plastic chassis paired with a small but very capable tripod. That tripod works well on a tabletop and is ideal for travel and wide-open spaces, but for use in the average backyard, you’ll likely want to mount the telescope on a full-size photography tripod. It’s got a 3/8-inch thread, but there’s a converter in the box to make it 1/4inch.

Alternatives

The device itself has very few physical controls — just a power button and a USB-C charging port. Everything else happens through the smartphone app. That’s a no-brainer in the short term, though there is always the nagging thought about how long app-based devices will last. After all, without the app, the Seestar S30 Pro is nothing; this likely isn’t a telescope you’re going to keep in the family for generations.

During testing, the app worked smoothly, though it occasionally informed us of large firmware updates and downloads for its built-in sky atlas. It’s worth setting it up at home before heading out to darker skies.

Performance

In the field, the Seestar S30 Pro performs impressively for such a compact and automated device. At night, the process is simple: place the telescope on its tripod, power it on, connect a smartphone and select a target from the built-in sky atlas. The telescope then plate-solves the stars, slews automatically to the chosen object, focuses and begins capturing exposures. Each image is stacked automatically, gradually revealing more detail as the integration time increases. The longer it runs, the cleaner and sometimes more colorful the final image becomes.

We tested it on a host of different objects, from the Pleaides (M45) and the Orion Nebula to the Leo Triplet and Bode’s galaxies and the Cigar galaxies. Happily, the Seestar S30 Pro can create FITS files for deep-sky objects, which astrophotographers can then export to image-stacking software. That’s what to do to reduce noise and maximize detail.

However, the S30 Pro still has limitations. Its 30mm aperture and alt-az mount restrict exposure lengths, which limits ultimate detail. Cue its EQ mode, which compensates for the Earth’s rotation. It necessitates the purchase of the Seestar TH10 Fluid Tripod Head (costing US$79) (or any equatorial wedge).

To use it, set the dial to your latitude and point it towards north, either using Polaris, the North Star, or just the compass on your phone. There’s then an in-app guide to fine-tune the positioning. Once completed, the app goes into EQ mode, enabling much longer exposures for objects.

If you want to image large areas of the night sky — either for large nebulae or for the Milky Way (or constellations) — there are two choices. Milky Way mode is the easiest and quickest, whereby the wide-angle camera takes images quickly, or the slow mosaic mode, during which the telephoto takes lots of smaller images and stitches them together. The latter, of course, is how to create higher resolution images.

Lunar imaging is very simple, while daytime imaging with the solar filter is straightforward, allowing quick captures of sunspots using the telephoto camera for close-ups.

ZWO Seestar S30 Pro: Verdict

The ZWO Seestar S30 Pro proves that astrophotography doesn’t need to involve complicated equipment or a huge financial investment. For photographers curious about capturing the night sky, it offers an incredibly simple way to start. Setup takes minutes, the automation handles the difficult parts, and the results can be surprisingly good with much integration time. Compared to the original Seestar S30, the 4K sensor, improved optics and expanded imaging modes make the S30 Pro a much more capable photographic tool, particularly for anyone interested in editing their images.

Check out our full guide to the best smart telescopes

While many smart telescopes focus on ease of use at the expense of precision, the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini carves out a different niche. With its flask-sized form factor and basic resolution, it’s clearly not aiming to replace a full-size astrophotography rig, but for those looking for a compact, capable, and self-contained imager to take on the road, it’s a compelling option.

The Dwarf Mini is built around a 30mm f/5 apochromatic refractor, with a Sony IMX662 image sensor and a fully-motorized mount that handles both object tracking and image stacking. Like most smart telescopes, there's no eyepiece — all interaction is via a smartphone app — and it’s designed to make the process of capturing nebulae, galaxies, and clusters as seamless as possible. 

From solar imaging with the included filter to deep-sky observations through its built-in filters, the Dwarf Mini performs well across the board, but never excels. Crucially, it supports equatorial (EQ) tracking for up to 90-second exposures. 

For more serious astrophotographers — or simply those who want to travel light — this feature alone will set it apart from many of its competitors. For others, the chance to take images of the sun and moon with a pocket-sized device will be enough to justify its place in a camera bag—or even a pocket. 

Specifications

Optical design: Apochromatic refractor

Sensor: 1/2.8in Sony IMX662

Resolution: 2 megapixels

Aperture: 1.18 inches / 30mm

Focal length: 150mm / 5.91 inches (f/5)

Field of view: 50.59 x 45.06° (wide) / 2.45 x 2.14° (telephoto)

Battery life: 4 hours (7,000mAh)

Weight: 1.8lb / 840g

Mount type: Motorized alt-azimuth / EQ mode

Accessories: USB-C cable, solar filter

Price and availability

The Dwarf Mini is available for around £359 / $399 / AU$595, making it compete in competition with other entry-level smart scopes like the ZWO Seestar S30. While it undercuts the larger Dwarf 3 and Seestar S30 Pro, it lacks a carry case or tripod (though custom-made add-on products are available from DwarfLab). For astrophotographers who already own tripods and camera bags, these omissions may be irrelevant, as the Dwarf Mini uses a standard 1/4-inch thread (making it compatible with any basic tabletop tripod or travel tripod) and is easy to store in a camera bag or even a jacket pocket. 

Build and handling

In the hand, the 1.8lb / 840g Dwarf Mini is surprisingly dense for its size, but remains impressively compact — smaller than most long lenses and easy to pack alongside other camera gear. It’s sensible to use it with a tall tripod to achieve a wide-field view of the night sky, but it’s so small that it can be mounted on a tripod support arm alongside a DSLR or mirrorless camera.

About half the size of a credit card, the included solar filter attaches magnetically and is well-made, though there’s no case or drawstring pouch to protect it from bumps or scratches. More concerning is the lack of any hard case for the scope itself, which would benefit from sturdier travel protection given its purpose-built portability. Again, one is available on the DwarfLab website — though we used a large sock. 

One issue we did encounter was with the built-in sky atlas — planetarium software that can be used to locate an object, or frame an image of the wide-field night sky. Although it works very well, it does require an initial large download and often a top-up, so it’s worth logging in to the app while still on WiFi before venturing to a remote location. The same applies to common firmware updates. 

Performance

The Dwarf 3 is very easy to use and has some advanced modes that make it much more than a quick-hit novelty device. Initial setup is refreshingly quick. Power on the Dwarf Mini, connect your phone to its WiFi signal and launch the DwarfLab app. When using an iPhone, we did experience some connectivity issues that made the process longer than we had hoped — not something we encountered with an Android device. Once it’s connected, its built‑in star atlas can be used to select a target, with the scope using plate solving to automatically align itself with the night sky to find the object. 

Like all smart telescopes, the Dwarf Mini captures short exposures (typically 10 seconds). She stacks them automatically in real time to reduce noise and enhance contrast, producing vibrant, usable images of bright deep-sky objects within minutes. The images improve constantly, but you can’t see the current image until it’s saved. It makes no difference for astrophotography, but it does make it less appealing for outreach when you want to share images of the night sky in real-time. 

During testing from a suburban location, we successfully imaged popular winter targets such as the Orion Nebula (M42), the Pleiades (M45), and several open clusters — all from under heavy light pollution.

While the 2MP resolution is modest, results are crisp and colourful on phone and tablet screens. DwarfLab’s own Stellar Studio can make adjustments within the app, though it’s worth noting that this tool only works when connected to the scope, and processing is slow. It’s rather time-consuming and cumbersome, though for open clusters, the “star correction” tool finally plate-solves all the images in the stack and produces a sharp-looking result. It’s also possible for advanced users to export low-res JPEG, mid-res PNG and hi-res FITS files for post-processing.

One standout feature is EQ (equatorial) mode, which allows a telescope to track the sky in sync with Earth’s rotation. Once manually aligned with Polaris — something the app walks you through — the Dwarf Mini can track objects for up to 90 seconds per exposure. That’s a significant improvement over the 15 seconds or so typical of alt-azimuth mounts. This is especially useful for imaging objects near the zenith, where field rotation can cause star blurring and streaking. For more casual users, EQ mode is not strictly necessary. Without it, you still get share-worthy results with minimal effort.

Unlike most smart telescopes, the Dwarf Mini can also be used by day. Solar imaging with the included magnetic filter revealed detailed sunspots. At the same time, results with the moon, both in the day and after dark, were sharp and well-defined considering the scope’s compact optics. 

Verdict

For seasoned astrophotographers looking to travel light — or spend less time setting up — the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini is a tempting solution. It doesn’t offer the resolution or flexibility of a full imaging setup, but for wide-field targets, solar and lunar imaging and deep-sky snapshots, it’s hard to resist as a supplementary travel-friendly astro-rig. 

Alternatives

Check out our full guide to the best smart telescopes

NASA has detected a precursor or progenitor to a supernova for the first time – and it's all thanks to old photos. Researchers have now been able to study some of a supernova's progression by comparing images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

The star, designated 2025pht, was located in the galaxy NGC 1637 and died some 40 million years ago. It took the light from the cosmic explosion this long to reach the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) – NASA’s multi-telescope system for detecting supernovae.

Researchers first spotted the supernova in June of 2025, but, most importantly, the exploding star is in a region that the telescope has photographed before. Researchers then got to work identifying the progenitor – the star that died – by aligning and analyzing archive images of Galaxy NGC 1637 taken by the Hubble and James Webb telescopes before it exploded. It's the first time that a supernova progenitor has been photographed by Webb, NASA says.

NASA has photographed a supernova before, but this time, researchers had old photos to use as a reference and gather data about what happened before the star became a supernova.

"We’ve been waiting for this to happen – for a supernova to explode in a galaxy that Webb had already observed," explained the study's lead author, Charlie Kilpatrick of Northwestern University. "We combined Hubble and Webb data sets to completely characterize this star for the first time,”

The researchers found that the supernova progenitor star was a “surprisingly red” supergiant in 2024, indicating that it was surrounded by dust blocking shorter wavelength blue light.

“It’s the reddest, most dusty red supergiant that we’ve seen explode as a supernova,” said graduate student and co-author of the results paper published on the analysis, Aswin Suresh of Northwestern University.

The James Webb Telescope uses a MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) to create images of the night sky.

NIRCam observes near-infrared light with wavelengths (0.6–5 microns) slightly longer than those of visible light to capture crisp images of stars and early galaxies, while MIRI observes longer mid-infrared wavelengths (5–28 microns) to detect cooler cosmic dust, gas, and proto-stars.

NASA launched the James Webb Telescope in 2021 with the mission of studying “every phase of the history of the universe” from the Big Bang to the formation of solar systems that can support life.

Since then, the telescope has captured unbelievable images, including of the most distant galaxy ever photographed and previously undiscovered planets.

Earlier this year, NASA announced it'll launch a new space telescope by May 2027. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will boast a 288MP camera and work in collaboration with James Webb to reveal ”billions of stars, hundreds of black holes and hundreds of forming planetary systems."

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Check out these mesmerizing images from the James Webb Telescope, enabling you to gaze into a black hole and see the “jewelled ring” in the cosmos.

NASA is set to launch its latest mind-blowing space telescope, which the agency says will “expand our understanding of the universe".

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, officially slated for launch in May 2027, but on track to enter space from as early as fall 2026, will be NASA’s flagship telescope. NASA says it will reveal ”billions of stars, hundreds of black holes and hundreds of forming planetary systems".

In part, this will be achieved thanks to the Wide Field Instrument, a 288MP camera with the power to create images of our cosmos from the solar system almost the entire way to the edge of the observable universe.

The Wide Field Instrument will enable each of Roman's images to capture a section of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full moon – that’s to say, how big the moon appears to the human eye.

NASA says that the Roman and recently-launched James Webb telescopes will work together in different but complementary ways to “trace the evolution of the universe”.

Roman will scan larger portions of the universe, creating images many times bigger than what James Webb does, enabling rapid surveying.

While James Webb will hone in on precise locations within these surveys using its higher-resolution system to capture infrared images of specific cosmic bodies light-years away.

The Roman telescope mission will last five years with a key focus on discovering microslensing signals – when gravitational forces of other planetary bodies warp the light emitted from a background star.

In theory, this should allow the telescope to identify planets within the habitable zone of a star's orbit radius.

Regardless of what it identifies, the images that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will capture are bound to be unbelievable.

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The 10-year, 2.5 billion pixel image of the Andromeda Galaxy and the forming star ‘fireworks’ captured by the James Webb Telescope.

When we first covered Vaonis' Hyperia back in 2021, it sounded almost mythical – a "domestic Hubble" promised for wealthy amateur photographers, carrying an eye-watering price tag and an ambitious feature list. Now, Hyperia is no longer a concept. It's real, refined, and significantly more expensive...

Officially revealed in its final form, Hyperia answers a question posed by Vaonis and Canon: what happens when you remove every limit?

The answer: a $99,000+ all-in-one digital observatory, built for museums, science centers, and also professional public outreach – and it may be the most ambitious imaging instrument ever aimed beyond traditional observatories.

Canon & Vaonis

Canon optics + Vaonis engineering: an alliance that changes everything

Hyperia marks a pivotal moment for Vaonis: a deep technical partnership with Canon. It's simple. Canon brings the optical DNA. Hyperia's optical system is built around a 150mm aperture and fast f/4 focal ratio, optimized to capture faint light with maximum efficiency.

Inside, 17 precision-engineered Canon lenses work as a single optical system, correcting distortion, chromatic aberration, and field curvature before light even reaches the sensor.

Each element is treated with Canon's most advanced anti-reflective technology: Air Sphere Coating. It minimizes internal reflections and preserves contrast.

The result is deep blacks, controlled highlights, and remarkably even sharpness from center to edge – critical for large-format astrophotography. This imaging is designed pixel-for-pixel, without compression or compromise.

Hyperia

With Hyperia, tracking, derotation, imaging, and processing are fully integrated into a single instrument. The dedicated app manages everything from planning and guided sessions to multi-night image stacking, object catalogs, and AI-assisted support – making Hyperia suitable for expert and public discovery and education.

Key features

1. Field Derotator: Perfectly aligned stars
Keeps stars motionless during long exposures, ensuring sharper and more accurate astrophotography.

2. Filter Drawer: Filters at your fingertips
Swap filters in seconds and adapt instantly to any sky conditions or imaging style.

3. Direct-Drive Tracking System: Precision in motion
Delivers ultra-smooth, silent, and backlash-free tracking. Up to 60°/s - Full rotation in 6seconds.

4. Full-Frame Back-Illuminated Sensor: A 45MP full-frame
3.30° × 2.20° field of view, capturing faint details with exceptional clarity and depth.

5. Aluminum Body: Engineered for endurance
A rigid and thermally stable aluminum structure designed to perform flawlessly in demanding environments.

6. Seamless Ground Mounting Plate: Stability built in
A clean, integrated base that mounts and levels instantly for vibration-free, hassle-free observing.

Price & Availability

Hyperia is available from $99,000 (approx. £73,480 / AU$147,240). Production is strictly limited, with pre-orders opening in January 2026 and deliveries expected in 2027. Find more info here.

Your Alternative

For most, Hyperia will remain a dream instrument. The good news? Vaonis also offers far more realistic products, like the Vaonis Vespera II.

The Vespera II is compact, portable, and dramatically more affordable, available from $1,590 / £1,395/ AU$3,215.

It delivers automated deep-sky imaging with minimal setup. It's ideal for solo imaging, group sessions, and photographers curious about astrophotography without committing to observatory-level hardware.

Because, in the end, Hyperia shows what happens when you remove every limit and let engineering take over – and the six-figure price makes sure you don't forget it.

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Browse the best smart telescopes, best telescopes for astrophotography, and best star tracker camera mounts for astrophotography.

DwarfLab has revealed the smallest smart telescope to date – and significanly lighter and more portable than its existing Dwarf 3 model. Weighing just 820g or 29oz, new stargazing device has been designed to be as easy to use and convenient as possible. DwarfLab tells us that you can go from unboxing to shooting in just three minutes.

With a 360° motorized mechanism, it can find stars, planets and galaxies via the control of an app on your mobile phone. Despite its size, it offers a 7000mAh battery running time of up to four hours of running time. There is 64GB of built-in storage.

The resolution of Mini is lower than the Dwarf 3, offering a 1080P image from a 1/2.8in Sony IMX662 with 2.9µm pixels. The telscope has a150mm f/5 telephoto lens with 30mm aperture.

The scope comes equipped with three built-in filters. A dark-frame filter suppress thermal noise, an astro filter is designed to boost contrast of nebulae, and a narrow band filter suppresses city and lunar glow. An external solar filter is supplied in the box. Exposures of upto 90 seconds are possible using its equatorial mount mode.

The DwarfLab Mini 3 is available for pre-order now for $399 / £359 with shipping expected to start from December.

Check out our guide to the best smart telescopes and see our pick of the best Black Friday telescope deals

As the nights get longer, it is a perfect time to buy a telescope - and with Amazon's two-day Big Deal sale now in its final day of sales, this is a great time to find the best scope for exploring the night sky this winter.

• See all of today's Amazon camera deals

🇺🇸 Telescope deals in USA

Top US retailers:

🇺🇸 Amazon: Cheap prices on camera gear
🇺🇸 Adorama: Big discounts on cameras and tech
🇺🇸 Walmart: DSLR, Mirrorless & action cameras
🇺🇸 B&H Photo Video: Deals on camera brands
🇺🇸 Best Buy: Save on TVs, laptops, appliances
🇺🇸 Unistellar: Smart telescopes direct from the makers

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🇬🇧 Telescope deals in the UK

🇬🇧 Amazon: Cheap prices on camera gear
🇬🇧 Unistellar: Save up to £800 on smart telescopes
🇬🇧 John Lewis: The best for electrical deals
🇬🇧 Jessops: Deals from an iconic camera store
🇬🇧 Park Cameras: Top camera & lens prices
🇬🇧 Wex Photo Video: Great deals on the latest kit
🇬🇧 Very: Telescopes, GoPros, Canon cameras
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The best smart telescopes have come a long way in the past five years, evolving from curious gadgets into serious astrophotography tools. The Vaonis Vespera Pro sits in the middle of this new class of automated instruments, promising deep-sky astrophotography without the bulk, complexity or set-up time of traditional gear. Designed in France and fairly portable — though significantly heavier than budget smart telescopes — the Vespera Pro targets those who want to capture galaxies, nebulae, clusters, the sun and the moon with minimal fuss.

It’s essentially an upgrade on Vaonis’ previous Vespera smart telescopes. Built around the same 50 mm f/5 quadruplet refractor optics, here it pairs them with a higher-resolution Sony IMX676 sensor, a massive boost in onboard storage, and a battery capable of running all night. 

Like its siblings, it’s controlled entirely through the ever-evolving Singularity app, which handles alignment, focusing, and tracking automatically, and now offers advanced tools like CovalENS mosaics, multi-night stacking, manual exposure control, master dark calibration and planning features that make observing and capturing the cosmos easier than ever. 

However, the Vespera Pro is a significant investment over the capable and cheaper Vaonis Vespera II. Is it worth it? Here’s everything you need to know about the Vaonis Vespera Pro.

Vaonis Vespera Pro: Specifications

Vaonis Vespera Pro: Price & accessories

Vaonis smart telescopes are not cheap — and nor are their accessories. The Vespera Pro costs US$2,990 / £2,499 / AU$4,579, which puts it in the mid-range of smart telescopes along with the Unistellar Odyssey. 

Far below it in terms of cost are the likes of the SeeStar S30, ZWO Seestar S50 and the DwarfLab Dwarf 3, while above are Unistellar’s Odyssey Pro, eVscope eQuinox II and eVscope II, and the Celestron Origin. 

There are three filters available; a solar filter (for observing the sun) sells for $215/ £159 / AU$330, a dual band filter (for nebulae) goes for $500/ £370 / AU$769 and a CLS filter (designed to reduce the glow from light pollution) on the market for $297/ £219 / AU$455. 

All but the solar filter are included in a “filter bundle” package with the Vespera Pro, which sells for $3,618/ £3,088/ AU$5,540. A package available in the US adds just the solar filter and sells for US$3,169. A custom-made padded backpack for the Vespera Pro is sold for $215 / £159 / AU$330. 

Vaonis Vespera Pro: Build and handling

Like a lot of smart telescopes, the Vespera Pro has sleek, curved, minimalist styling very much in the Apple aesthetic. The glossy, sculpted chassis is clean, with just an on/off switch on display, with a USB-C slot hidden on the undercarriage. 

At just under 5kg with its small, extendable tripod, it’s light enough to carry into the garden or pack in the car, yet solid enough to feel stable during operation. Would we hike with it into the wilds? Probably not, but the included hard-shell carry case that protects the optics during travel is ideal for a camping or campervan trip. 

Although the tripod is compact, quick to deploy, and stable, it demands a wide-open sky. When used in an urban setting, it’s likely that a larger tripod will give it a better view of some objects. Either way, it needs stabilising. There’s a bubble level that sits between the Vespera Pro and the tripod for just that purpose. 

Set-up is simple. Press the power button, wait for the Wi-Fi signal, connect a phone or tablet, then launch the free Singularity app. From there, the scope handles the rest — alignment, focusing, target acquisition — in a matter of minutes (unless there’s cloud, which can slow or cancel the process). The app’s interface is clean and intuitive for first-timers, but also hides advanced modes for experienced users: mosaics, multi-night sequences, manual gain/exposure and even master dark calibration (the app simply requests you put the lens cap on at the end of the night while it shoots a quick dark frame). 

Although it can take a little time to plate-solve the stars and figure out where it is and where the target object is, once it’s settled, it slews quietly and accurately. 

Vaonis Vespera Pro: Performance

Like most smart telescopes, the Vespera Pro is built for exploring and imaging the deep sky. Using an alt-azimuth mount to find its targets, its optics and sensor shoot and stack 10-second exposures to bring star clusters, galaxies and faint nebulae into view. Crucially, it does all this from light-polluted urban skies. 

Its view of a 1.6 x 1.6 degree portion of the night sky is typically ample, but doesn’t quite fit in larger objects, such as the Andromeda Galaxy. Cue CovalENS mosaics to expand the field to 2.6 x 2.6 degrees. 

In practice, more useful is the option to build multi-night stacks, effectively meaning the user can study objects at different times and under different sky conditions to create an ever-improving image over time. 

The Vespera Pro can therefore be taken on trips to dark skies to add some better data to an existing image of, say, a faint nebula. It’s worth saying that the additional filters, particularly the dual-band filter (which selects wavelengths of Hydrogen Alpha (H-alpha) and Oxygen III (O-III) to increase contrast), work well. 

However, the first filter to invest in is the solar filter, which allows some excellent white-light images of sunspots and solar eclipses. Lunar images are equally impressive (and require no filter). However impressive solar and lunar images are, what you see is what you get — they can only be saved as JPEGs. 

As with all smart telescopes, planets don’t impress, with the Vesper Pro’s 250mm focal length just not suited, though with manual gain and exposure control, Jupiter, particularly, can be attempted. 

Is the Vespera Pro better than the Vespera II? Both share the same aperture, so light-gathering is identical, though the Vespera Pro’s smaller pixels mean a finer resolution. The downside is slower image acquisition. There are other differences — such as battery life and storage — but the decision will come down to price — the Vespera II is about half the cost, but offers more or less the same experience for beginners. 

Vaonis Vespera Pro: Verdict

The Vespera Pro is a premium smart telescope that solves the biggest barrier to deep-sky astrophotography – time. There’s no set-up beyond placing it on its tripod, no complex alignment and no delays. The Singularity app works well, images impress, and there’s a near-constant addition of new features and more advanced image processing. 

For those after maximum resolution, storage, and battery life, the Vespera Pro is a worthy upgrade on the lower-cost Vespera II, though beginners will likely not notice much difference. For those with more time, money, patience, and processing know-how, a traditional astrophotography rig will still outperform either, but if time, portability and ease of use are imperative, the Vaonis Vespera Pro is a fine choice of smart telescope.

Alternatives

Also see our guide to the best smart telescopes

The Vixen Optics Polarie is Bresser’s solution as a standalone unit, which was tested as a standalone unit for the purposes of this review.

Why do astrophotographers use star trackers? Over the course of the night, the positions of the stars and constellations appear to move. This is due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis, which, over prolonged exposures, results in star trails (in exposures that typically exceed 30 seconds).

A unit such as a star tracker is designed to do the opposite: to track the stars. They operate on the basis of polar alignment - in short, they are aligned to what is known as the celestial pole; the north celestial pole (NCP) for those in the northern hemisphere, the southern celestial pole (SCP) if located in the southern hemisphere.

Each has its own unique forms of alignment with known constellations and asterisms. Once aligned, the speed of your tracking mount can be dictated by the subject you are tracking. This could be different speeds for the sun, the moon, the stars themselves, or, as the Vixen Polarie attempts, a unique (½) ‘sidereal’ speed is adapted to capture images where both foreground and background stars are sharp and focused.

Once aligned, images can be acquired over prolonged periods in time (on heavy-duty mounts in particular - to utilise images of deep-sky objects - DSOs) to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of images. Boosting detail and limiting noise.

Constructed in mind as an ultra-compact effort, equatorial star-tracking unit. This portable unit produces a number of various speed settings, allowing for both wide-angle astrophotography as well as solar and lunar tracking.

Vixen Optics Polarie: Specifications

Vixen Optics Polarie: Price

Compared to other portable models on the market, the Polarie is rated as being slightly better value compared to other comparable models on the market, justified by its extensive compatibility when imaging and tracking multiple celestial targets, as well as being machined to a quality design.

Vixen Optics Polarie: Design & Handling

Overall, the design and handling of the Polarie are excellent. Appearing no larger in size compared to a conventional smartphone, the Polarie has been designed with portability in mind and is not overly heavy as a single unit.

The built-in tilt meter is a great feature to consider, as not only does this adjust the unit to the correct relative position of the celestial pole from your geographic location, but the built-in ‘preparation’ mode illuminates this dial using a red LED. So not only preserving your night-vision, but it can easily be adjusted with the use of a geared head mounted onto a durable tripod.

My only consideration, however, in accordance with Vixen's instruction, is the use of the QHD-33 Ball-head adapter (not included). Therefore, the photographer will need to either invest in a ball-head with a ¼ adapter, or if already in the kit bag, consider the unit incorporating a ¼” mounting. Therefore, a 3/8 - ¼ bracket will be needed for smooth operation.

Another consideration is the M-155MA Tripod (with built-in equatorial mount - not included). Whilst this is not necessary for the operation of the Polarie, a geared head can be used in its place as a secondary, durable solution, when pointing the unit towards the celestial pole.

Vixen Optics Polarie: Performance

The performance of the Polarie was good in terms of alignment in the context of its payload capacity and available features included with the unit. In the instance of using the polar sight-hole, it can only be used to perform a rough polar alignment. Therefore, it is a good option for an introductory unit to star tracking, but ideally, the optional POLARIE polar scope is needed to perform a more perfect polar alignment, when measuring in arc-minutes, at an extra cost.

The Polarie was operated using 2 conventional AA Alkaline batteries. So whilst offering an operating time of 2 hours would benefit standalone tracked images of the sky, an external power source is recommended if needing to operate the unit for greater periods of time (if, per say, to capture hydrogen-alpha emission over an extended period of time). The base plate was easily removed to attach an external ball head with a ⅜ to ¼ “ adapter when attaching a Sony A7SII and Sigma 20mm F/1.4 DG DN lens.

What I thought was a great consideration was the ½ sidereal speed consideration. As is typically with star trackers, images are captured from a static perspective to obtain foreground data and tracking at a sidereal rate for the stars, blending both images together. However, this speed makes it possible to retain a somewhat clear image of both the stars and to eliminate the diurnal motion of the stars.

Vixen Optics Polarie: Verdict

Overall, I would rate the Vixen Polarie as a great unit to attune more avid photographers to the process of star tracking and for taking longer exposures of the stars. Between 6-8 minutes on a rough polar alignment when adapted to wide-field astrophotography with a 20mm focal length. I would note, however, that those wishing to extend their exposure times will need to consider the optional accessory of the additional polar scope for a more attuned alignment.

Alternatives

If you’ve been thinking of getting into astrophotography but the expense and the need for telescopes, laptops and gear galore puts you off, check out the SeeStar S30. Small enough to pack alongside a DSLR or mirrorless camera in a photography backpack, this smart telescope is more lens-sized than telescope-sized, and is designed to put deep-sky photography in reach of absolute beginners. 

Built by Chinese company ZWO — a respected name in specialist astrophotography cameras  — and a follow-up to the larger Seestar S50, this diminutive smart telescope is built around a smaller 30mm/1.18 inch aperture refractor telescope. Automatically slewing to, and taking image after image of, deep-sky objects, it auto-stacks to remove noise and creates colorful images of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae. What’s the catch? 

ZWO Seestar S30: Specifications

ZWO Seestar S30: Price

The first generation of smart telescopes, from Unistellar and Vaonis, were large and expensive high-end objects, but in the last few years the trend is to the small and affordable — and that trend surely finds its peak with the SeeStar S30. 

At around £419 / US$399 / AU$699, it’s the most affordable smart telescope yet, undercutting the similarly sized Dwarflab Dwarf 3  (UK£492 / US$599 / AUS$811). Until recently, the most affordable smart telescope around was ZWO's SeeStar S50, at around £539, US$499 and AU$949. 

ZWO Seestar S30: Design & Handling

A small telescope with a CPU and a 64GB flash drive attached, the Seestar S30 is all an incredibly lightweight all-in-one astrophotography rig that’s exclusively controlled by a smartphone app. After selecting an object either from a list of recommended targets or from a planetarium-style virtual atlas, it auto-aligns and then tracks objects, taking away some major pain-points for beginners who don’t yet know the night sky. 

There’s more to the Seestar S30 than night photography. Its dual-lens telephoto and wide-angle system allows for both telephoto and wide-angle imaging, allowing both photos and videos in daylight and, once darkness falls, the ability to easily locate, say, the moon in the sky. 

At its core, the Seestars S30 is a 30mm/1.2 inch refractor that records images using its high definition-capable Sony IMX662 sensor, stacking and integrating them as it observes to create an ever-changing, ever-improving image.  

It comes with a USB-C cable to recharge its six-hour battery and a surprisingly compact tabletop tripod, as well as a handy magnetic solar filter for imaging sunspots on the solar surface. The product as a whole is so compact and lightweight that you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a novelty, but there are some advanced features. Perhaps the standout feature is framing mode, which allows the telescope to pan, rotate and stack images over several hours to create mosaic images of the larger celestial structures, such as the Andromeda Galaxy. It also includes built-in UV/IR cut and dual-band filters that help it image nebulae even when drowned in light pollution, while the app has AI noise reduction built-in.

Weighing just 1.65 kg and measuring 210mm x 140mm x 80mm, the Seestar S30 is remarkably portable. Its compact size allows it to fit comfortably in most camera bags, making it an excellent companion for photographers on the go. Eclipse chasers, in particular, should consider it for global travel — with the easily removable magnetic solar filter a particular attraction. 

Build quality is reasonable, with a tough plastic chassis and an aluminium tripod. It’s a tiny support; you’d be better off mounting the Seestar S30 on a proper photographic tripod to give it some height (it has a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread), particularly if you want to use it in a crowd. 

That chassis is adorned only with an on/off switch and a USB-C slot for recharging. All other controls are in its smartphone app, which worked well during our test. After selecting the first target, the Seestar S30 paused briefly to align itself with the stars it could see, plate-solving them with what it has in its database. It’s impressive stuff, though we did notice that it required a hefty 160MB data download to allow its sky atlas to be used. Paired with its propensity to require frequent firmware updates and we’d recommend powering up the Seestar S30 for a brief dry run to make sure it’s packed with the latest firmware before driving out to find dark skies. 

ZWO Seestar S30: Performance

In the field, the S30 is an impressive performer — especially when you consider how compact and automated it is. First, I imaged the sun, which was a point and shoot affair that required using a virtual joystick to zero-in, using an inset image from the wide-angle lens for context. 

Setting it up at night involves placing it on the tripod, powering it on, connecting a smartphone then picking a target in the app. The telescope then plate-solves, slews to the object, focuses, and begins capturing and stacking frames automatically. The longer it’s left for, the more images it takes, and the better the result. 

I tested with the help of Stéphane Picard at Cliff Valley Astronomy, shooting the deep sky from Broadleaf Ranch, a Dark Sky Destination in New Brunswick, Canada. The S30 was left to capture the Pinwheel galaxy (M101), with no filters, for 50 minutes. The result — once processed lightly in  Siril, Photoshop and LightRoom — shows the tenuous spiral arms of the outer galaxy. Next up was the Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula in Orion with similarly spectacular results. Finally, an early rise to point the the S30 at the Antares/M4 region in Scorpius, using the framing mode and 75 minutes of integration, resulted in a gloriously colorful image complete with dust lanes. 

The Sony IMX662 sensor captures high-quality images with minimal noise, and can be left alone to shoot while you do something else, which is always welcome if you’re kind of astrophotographer that likes to have multiple projects going on simultaneously. 

What the S30 lacks is ultimate resolution — the images you get are fairly small — while its alt-az mount restricts exposure lengths. It’s also not adept with planets. However, its limited field-of-view, which could be a shortcoming, is mitigated by its framing mode. 

ZWO Seestar S30: Verdict

So easy to use is the Seestar S30 that it’s tempting to state that it’s all about point, shoot and share, but there’s a lot of explore for anyone interested in doing serious astrophotography. Sure, the images you end up with won’t be particularly high resolution, but with many hours of integration and some time spent in post-processing, it’s possible to produce spectacularly colorful images to be proud of. Add the new framing mode, and the beautiful sun and moon images it’s capable of, and the Seestar S30 begins to look like the kind of tool that should be in the camera bag of every outdoor photographer. 

Alternatives

Check out our full guide to the best smart telescopes 

Do you need a smart telescope? You do if you fancy taking images of deep-sky objects like galaxies, star clusters and nebulae, but live in a light-polluted town or city. Cue the Dwarf 3 (£418 / $520), a smart telescope that is exceptionally small. Weighing a mere 1.3 kg / 2.87lbs, it’s light and narrow and, crucially, able to fit into a camera bag.

Its big trick is to take short exposures of “faint fuzzies” such as galaxies, nebulae and globular clusters and stack them in real-time, improving them with every additional image. It can also shoot the moon and the sun, the latter thanks to a solar filter shaped like a pair of solar eclipse glasses that snap into place across the Dwarf 3’s two lenses — one a 3.4mm wide-angle (principally for finding objects) and one a 35mm zoom.

As well as being able to image celestial objects, Dwarf 3 can take photos and videos of the daytime world, with birds and other animals the perfect targets. Is Dwarf 3 one of the best smart telescopes or one of the best budget telescopes? Here’s why it’s a great addition to the camera backpack of any landscape photographer who often finds themself out in twilight or night.

DwarfLabs Dwarf 3: Specifications

DwarfLab Dwarf 3: Price

Dwarf 3 does have a slight price problem. It costs $599 / £492 / AU$811, which may seem like a relative bargain — particularly when compared to high-profile and expensive smart telescopes like the Unistellar Odyssey and Vaonis Vespera 2 — but the smart telescope market is changing so fast.

Dwarflab’s main competitor in this entry-level smart telescope market is ZWO, which recently followed up its larger ZWO Seestar S50 with the smaller Seestar S30, a very similar product to the Dwarf 3, and for a considerably more affordable $399 / £419 / AU$699. Dwarf 3’s telescope does have a slightly larger aperture than the Seestar S30, but it doesn’t come with a tripod. That’s a shame, though it’s not likely to most photographers. It has a 1/4-inch tripod thread and can be put on a tabletop tripod if placed somewhere with a big-sky view.

DwarfLab Dwarf 3: Design & Handling

The Dwarf 3 is tiny, but not especially lightweight. At 2.87lb/1.3 kg, in the hand, it feels like the equivalent of holding a heavy wide-angle lens. It may be heavier in your camera backpack than you might like, but it’s so narrow it fits easily alongside other equipment. Although when used to scan the heavens and take deep-sky images, it is much easier on a tall tripod, with as few obstacles in its way as possible, Dwarf 3 is so small it could even be mounted on a simple tripod support arm alongside a DLSR or mirrorless camera. That’s particularly true if it’s used to shoot the sun or moon or to take video.

The build quality is excellent, and a high-grade solar filter is also supplied. Arranged like a pair of eclipse glasses to protect both the wide-angle and telephoto lens, it’s got an impressive magnetic design, but it would be nice if there were a proper protective case for them instead of the drawstring bag, which doesn’t add much protection.

DwarfLab Dwarf 3: Performance

In use, the Dwarf 3 is mostly impressive. Although connectivity issues between the smartphone and telescope dogged early review sessions, once the link was made, the set-up was straightforward. For shooting the sun and moon, I found the dual-lens system helpful, with the wide-angle lens easy to move manually into position — using a virtual joystick in the app — before selecting “sun track” or “moon track” to keep it in the field of view.

For deep sky objects at night, the app's built-in sky atlas is useful for selecting targets, though before it can find them, Dwarf 3 has to align with the stars. Once done, it shows the target — usually looking very dim and indistinct, before getting to work taking and stacking long exposure images, with presets, defaults and its built-in filters producing very impressive results. With its real-time stacking and AI-powered noise reduction, it cleverly mitigates light pollution to capture faint nebulae including the bright Orion Nebula (M42) and the Horsehead Nebula.

There’s a handy “recommended” list of objects to image, though you do need to ensure you have a clear view of as much of the sky as possible to rely on that (or, better still, learn the night sky so you’ll instinctively know what’s within reach). At any point within the image process, you can see the name of the target, the shutter speed, gain, and how many separate images have been taken.

For galaxies and nebulae, the longer you leave Dwarf 3 alone, the better the composite image. To that end, it’s also important to take dark frames, which the app does prompt you to do.

You could leave it on default mode and enjoy the Dwarf 3 perfectly, well, but astrophotographers who want to go deeper can extract the image files as FITS and indulge in manual stacking and post-processing. There’s also a new EQ mode that enables the Dwarf 3 to ape an (expensive) equatorial mount. That necessitates aligning the telescope with Dwarf 3, with the principal advantage being longer exposures.

DwarfLab Dwarf 3: Verdict

Compact and well-built, the Dwarf 3 smart telescope is a great tool for all kinds of photographers and wannabe astrophotographers. It makes deep-sky astrophotography easy and, just as importantly, it’s small and portable enough to be taken to the very darkest night skies as an afterthought in a camera backpack. However, while it impresses on both ease of use and image processing, as well as advanced manual options, it faces stiff competition from rivals, which offer similar features at a lower price, something not helped by its lack of a tripod.

Alternatives

From $229 at Move Shoot Move

Astrophotographers attach their cameras to star‑tracking mounts to counteract Earth’s rotation. Because the planet turns, stars drift across the field of view; in exposures longer than roughly 30 seconds, they form noticeable trails. A tracker rotates the camera at the same rate as the sky, only in the opposite direction, so the stars stay fixed and sharp.

To achieve this, the tracker must be polar‑aligned. Its axis is aimed at the celestial pole: Polaris (the north celestial pole) for observers in the Northern Hemisphere, or a point near Octantis (the south celestial pole) for those in the Southern Hemisphere. Built‑in polar scopes or mobile‑app overlays help match the reticle to familiar constellations and asterisms.

After alignment, you choose a drive rate that matches your target. Standard sidereal speed follows the stars; solar and lunar rates compensate for the Sun's or Moon’s slightly different motion. Some devices, such as the Vixen Polarie, even offer a half‑sidereal setting that keeps both foreground scenery and background stars acceptably sharp in a single shot.

Accurate tracking makes multi‑minute and on heavier equatorial mounts, multi‑hour exposures possible. Stacking these long integrations dramatically improves the signal‑to‑noise ratio, bringing out faint detail in deep‑sky objects while suppressing image noise.

The MoveShootMove Nomad is a popular choice amongst the astrophotography community in terms of portable approaches to star tracker technology. Current contenders on the market involve multiple components, requiring a more elaborate understanding of polar alignment and setup. The Nomad breaks boundaries as a portable solution, where size is no object in providing payload as a unit purely designed for landscape astrophotography. Not only is the NOMAD a desired tool in the astrophotographer’s kit bag, but it is also well adapted to a number of travel applications: from overseas assignments and long-distance photo shoots.

MSM Nomad: Specifications

MSM Nomad: Price

For its level of compactability, aesthetic, design, and purpose - I would rate this as the best value example of a star tracker listed on the market, compared to other variants within a similar price bracket. The MoveShootMove Nomad also offers a number of included accessories with the unit.

You can buy the Nomad in a range of kit options directly from Move Shoot Move, starting from $230.

MSM Nomad: Design & Handling

Constructed from CNC-machined Anodised aluminium, provides a quality first impression of the unit and its characterful design. As a single mechanical component, its construction is built to a high-quality standard that is built to last and withstand impact and potential damage during transit.

MoveShootMove prides itself on the key design consideration to provide a portable star-tracker solution - a concept designed for backpackers, capturing images from some of the most remote regions of the world. Size and storage being a key design consideration, MoveShootMove stating, this model is “called NOMAD for a reason”. It is “designed to travel with you wherever you go”.

The approach to polar alignment is simplified and rather unique when compared to other star tracking methods. The supplied laser pointer is screwed on to an external mounting bracket on the tracker and further attached to a bracket that houses a polarscope utility. As is the case with any means of polar alignment, some minor knowledge of astronomical objects is required to locate the north celestial pole (NCP - Constellations: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor) for northern hemisphere users, and the south celestial pole (SCP - Constellations: Octans and Crux) for southern hemisphere users. A 24-hour polar clock utility is integrated into the internal polar scope graphic, enabling fine-tuned polar alignment.

Consultation provides instruction in using Nomad alongside the latest astronomy smartphone apps and software, in locating the position of the pole star, Polaris, or Octans on a night of observation. With each hemisphere requiring different methods for polar alignment, MoveShootMove has all bases covered. For the purpose of this review, PS Align Pro was used to locate the North Celestial Pole. A Fluorescent tube is also included, which is attached to the front lens of the polar scope to naturally illuminate the polar clock utility. This provides a unique approach to illuminating the polar clock utility, used to preserve night vision as an alternative option of using a red light source.

MSM Nomad: Performance

In terms of performance, Kit C was selected for the purpose of this review, with a primary focus on landscape astro-imaging. There are a number of different packages available, depending on your preferred imaging setup, that include optional wedges, Z and V Mounts (which are more commonly used to process Milky Way panoramas), ballheads, unit only, as well as rechargeable headlamps.

Compared to its predecessor, the MSM Rotator - the design consideration required specific weight positioning to keep the ball head secure. This concept has been ‘eliminated’ for the Nomad, allowing for a more user-friendly interface. The unit is attached to a tripod, using an industry-standard quick-release plate that is now fixed in two positions - to prevent unnecessary movement and twisting of the tracker once secured to the mount.

The hardware of the Nomad is built to withstand twice the amount of torque compared to the Rotator model. Offering a payload of up to 7.7lb (3.5kg) is a more considerate design aspect for the use of heavier, wide-angle lenses.

The laser pointer housing has been improved, using the external attachment to screw directly into the tracker and prevent ‘wobble’ during operation. One observation made is that collimation of both the polar scope and laser pointer are required, to provide a central pivot on all axes. This can be tested by fully rotating both the laser pointer and the polarscope around a single fixed point. The position of both the laser and polar scope can be collimated using the hex key supplied. The laser pointer is projected onto a wall space, marking the current position for the laser, applying the adjustment, and turning to the unit to assess movement is central to the projected laser. A similar process for the polar scope. Pointing at a distant object, such as a telegraph wire, can be used as a target when performing minor adjustments. Again, assessing central movement to the polar clock graphic.

For timelapse astrophotographers, however, this is not a design consideration that has but built into the Nomad. MoveShootMove states, this model provides “a solution, as the easiest to use, most portable and inexpensive star tracker”. Targeting both vid and professional astrophotographers. Weighing up the odds of being the easiest to use and most travel-friendly model.

MSM Nomad: Verdict

Overall, I would advocate the MoveShootMove Nomad as the leading example of a portable star tracker option. Not only has the unit been designed with astrophotographers in mind, in terms of versatility, quality, and use, with modern quirks to its design and operation for polar alignment, whilst simplifying the process of alignment to the north celestial pole in a short period of time.

Once familiar with the individual components, it allows for quick setup and teardown times, whilst providing generous tracking capability for the purpose of a landscape astrophotography-style tracker. I would therefore highly commend the Nomad as a firm consideration in my camera bag when out shooting under the stars.

From $229 at Move Shoot Move

Alternatives

The ever-faithful Hubble Space Telescope has been deployed on many missions over its 34 years in service, and helped us discover some of the deepest secrets of the universe.

One of these missions is the Outer Planet Atmosphere Legacy (OPAL) project, which involves Hubble making yearly observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to understand their atmospheric dynamics and evolution over time.

The image below was collected as part of OPAL, and shows a montage of the four over the last 10 years between 2014 and 2024.

By measuring and monitoring features on each of these planets, scientists can use the data collected on these giant gas planets to understand their atmospheric dynamics and evolution over time.

The scientists from OPAL monitor the planets each year when they are closest to Earth in their orbit, to understand how their weather changes over time.

These outer planets experience seasonal changes and atmospheric conditions unlike those on Earth, due to their distance from the sun, and different rotational tilts relative to their orbital axis. Studying these differences can help scientists understand more about planets beyond our solar system, as well as our own.

Launched in April 1990 and named after Dr Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), Hubble orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 340 miles (547 kilometers), inclined 28.5 degrees to the equator, at a vantage point above the Earth’s negative atmospheric effects. Travelling at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) Hubble takes about 95 minutes to complete one orbit around the Earth.

The light from space is distorted from the view of Earth by the shifting pockets of air in our planet's atmosphere – this is why stars seem to twinkle to our eye. The Earth’s atmosphere also blocks certain wavelengths of light, particularly ultraviolet light, which means that space is the only place where a telescope can get a truly clear and comprehensive view of the universe.

“Although Hubble also sees visible and infrared light, it is the telescope’s capability in the ultraviolet that will not be matched or replaced in the near future,” says NASA.

NASA adds: “Hubble collects light from celestial objects and directs it to the telescope’s science instruments. Hubble’s current suite of instruments includes the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), and Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS).

“These are not the only instruments that have flown aboard Hubble. The telescope was designed to be visited periodically by astronauts, who brought new instruments and technology, and made repairs, from December 1993 to May 2009.”

You might also like…

Why not take a look at our guides to the best telescopes for astrophotography, the best cameras for astrophotography, and the best lenses for astrophotography.

Dr Edwin Powell Hubble, who lends his name to the iconic Hubble Space Telescope, was one of the leading astronomers of the twentieth century.

Born 135 years ago today on 20 November 1889, his discoveries in the 1920s, including that countless galaxies exist beyond our own Milky Way, revolutionized our understanding of the universe, and our small place within it. He died in 1959, aged 63.

According to NASA, Hubble was a tall athletic man “who excelled at sports and even coached high school basketball for a short while, and started his professional science career during one of the most exciting eras of astronomy.

“It was 1919, just a few years after Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, and bold, new ideas about the universe were fermenting. Hubble was offered a staff position at the Mount Wilson Observatory, which housed the newly commissioned 100-inch Hooker telescope, then the largest telescope in the world. Hubble, it seemed, had the universe placed in his lap.”

When Hubble came on the scene, most astronomers believed that our galaxy was the entire universe.

In 1923, Hubble trained the pioneering Hooker Telescope on a hazy patch of sky known as the Andromeda Nebula. He found that in it were stars just like those within the Milky Way, only dimmer.

One such star was a Cepheid variable, a type of star with a known varying brightness, that can be used to measure distances. From this Hubble deduced that the Andromeda Nebula was not a nearby star cluster, but an entire other galaxy, now called the Andromeda Galaxy.

By the end of the 1920s Hubble had discovered more evidence that convinced most astronomers that the Milky Way galaxy was one of millions of others within the universe, changing our understanding of the universe in the same way Darwin changed our understanding of evolution.

Hubble’s most astonishing discovery however, was made while studying the spectra of 45 galaxies, and in particular of the Doppler velocities of those galaxies relative to our own Milky Way galaxy.

He found that the farther apart galaxies were from each other, the faster they moved away from each other, which told Hubble that the universe expands uniformly in all directions.

Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has continued to transform our understanding of the universe, building on the work of its great namesake and carrying on his incredible legacy.

One of the Hubble Space Telescope's most incredible discoveries were the Pillars of Creation in 1995. More recently it discovered a new unusual galaxy, and captured incredible images of the transformation process of a nebula under the influence of baby stars

Take a look at our guides to the best telescopes for astrophotography, the best telescopes for beginners, and the best telescopes for kids.

Exploring the planets and distant nebulae with a telescope is great fun – but it can be hard work for the beginner. And it can be a freezing experience in the middle of winter too! A new breed of smart telescopes is changing all this. Instead of looking through an eyepiece, a camera in the telescope beams the image to your phone or tablet - so you can stay in the warm, whilst you leave the telescope outside. And you can control the position of the tripod remotely - using the app to guide you automatically to the most interesting things in the night sky.

These smart telescopes are expensive - but market-leader Unistellar is slashing up to £800 of its Evscope 2 smart telescope – and knocking £400 of its budget Equinox 2 model.…

Check out other Black Friday telescope deals - with options for all budgets

If you've ever tried afocal astrophotography, the BeaverLAB Finder TW2 may be for you. Holding a smartphone camera up to the lens of a telescope is tricky, and while it is possible to create spectacular images of the moon, it's trial and error. Step forward the BeaverLAB Finder TW2, a refractor telescope that eschews smartphone telescope adapters and goes instead for something that makes it unique: its own digital camera.

Does that make the Finder TW2 a smart telescope? No, it does not. This is a dashcam-style camera piggybacking on a manual telescope. The concept may be novel, but it lacks the niceties of a smart telescope – chiefly its inability to self-align or a motorized mount to automatically slew to objects and keep them in the field of view.

However, by promising to take images of everything from the moon and sun to deep-sky objects and be usable during the day, can the Beaverlab Finder TW2 get anywhere near the best telescopes for astrophotography?

BeaverLAB Finder TW2: Specifications

BeaverLAB Finder TW2: Price

The Finder TW2 is currently being promoted on Indiegogo and is due to go on sale in September 2024, costing $499/£378. That compares to the company's Finder TW1, which sells for $299 / £227 / AU$549.

Accessories in the box include the Starlight Camera DS1 (manufactured by dash cam-maker Novatek), a remote control, a 0.5x focal reducer, a solar filter, a data cable, a handy planisphere, a portable bag, a tripod and a finderscope.

Be cautious when backing products on crowdfunding sites like IndieGogo, as there are no refunds if you change your mind, and no guarantees that you will receive the product should development be canceled. BeaverLAB is an established name, and we had hands-on with the BeaverLAB Finder TW2 and can verify it is a legitimate product, but we don't endorse crowdfunding sites. If you have any doubts, we would suggest waiting until it hits store shelves.

BeaverLAB Finder TW2: Design & Handling

Despite looking like an oversized webcam from the last century, the 367g/12.96ozlbs Starlight DS1 camera has a sizeable five-inch touchscreen (1280x0720 pixel resolution) that conveniently folds out. Attached to the telescope in place of a 1.25-inch eyepiece — but also including one to focus light on its 1/1.8-inch CMOS sensor — the DS1 can record 3840×2160 resolution still images (JPEGS) and 4K video at 60/30/25/24fps (MP4). It's an upgrade on the Finder TW1, which has a 1/2.8-inch device, a shorter focal length, and no touchscreen camera. The DS1 can be used with any telescope that takes 1.25-inch eyepieces. That's most of them.

The Finder TW2 is far from a smart telescope; it can't align with the night sky and lock on to targets autonomously, nor does it have built-in planetarium software. Everything you see and capture using the Finder TW2 must be navigated manually. In short, you have to know the night sky well – and have bags of patience with the Finder TW2's shortcomings.

Even if you can navigate the cosmos, manually locking on targets proves difficult on the Finder TW2. It's necessary to loosen a few knobs on its mount to move its optics, but tightening them once in position is difficult. Sure, it locks the optics, but the entire telescope suffers from droop, so the object is immediately lost. It's therefore necessary to learn the hardware's defects and compensate for them, for example, moving beyond the object so, once tightened, the telescope comes to rest while pointing at your intended target. It's not difficult to point it at the moon, but without a motor or an equatorial mount, constant tweaking is required to account for Earth’s rotation. That’s difficult because no fine-tuning controls are onboard to help nudge the optics back on target. Once you've got a target in the telescope's crosshairs, focusing the image introduces such a significant movement that it takes a while to get the image — as seen either on the back of the camera, or on a phone using the Beaverlab app — dead-on sharp.

BeaverLAB Finder TW2: Performance

The Finder TW2 can take some interesting images of the moon and sun but little else. Once locked onto the moon, with the optics focused as best we could on this fast-moving target, the Finder TW2 does well. Images and video are impressively contrasty, though rather soft, and we did notice some chromatic aberration on the finished images. It's tricky to tweak image parameters when pressing the touchscreen itself, which introduces a shake that never really goes away. The touchscreen is of below-average quality and lacks sensitivity. Sadly, the Beaverlab app allows only remote viewing and digital zooming.

Pointing the Finder TW2 at the sun proved difficult; sure, there's a solar filter, but trying to locate a one-degree-wide object in the daytime sky using a telescope that blocks out all light except 1% of sunlight is not easy. Once we could observe our star, the images Finder TW2 took were enjoyable, highlighting the myriad sunspots on the sun in this “solar maximum" year.

The final straw came when we tried to transfer images to a computer, a process that continually crashed the camera's OS, necessitating a reset. The app suffered a similar issue when downloading images and video to a smartphone’s camera roll.

BeaverLAB Finder TW2: Verdict

The Finder TW2 is best thought of as a budget innovation. It can impress with its images and videos, as long as you don't expect too much. The entire rig is hamstrung by droop, a lack of fine-tuning controls to zero in on an astronomical target, and rather soft images. How long can taking basic images of the moon and sun stay interesting?

Alternatives

French smart telescope maker Unistellar used IFA 2024 to announce a new image processing technology that promises to reveal more color and detail in deep-sky objects, including galaxies, star clusters and faint nebula.

Unistellar's new Vivid Vision Signal Processing technology, which will be available in October as a free firmware update across its suite of smart telescopes, will add an optional enhancement to each image, which will take two minutes to complete. Vivid Vision uses the latest data on the color of stars collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, which has spent the last decade mapping the motions, luminosity, temperature and composition of stars. 

The brand currently has four smart telescopes across two ranges – the eQuinox 2 and eVscope 2 in its Expert range and the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro in its Discovery range, launched at CES 2024 in January. 

The eVscope 2 and Odyssey Pro both sport a Nikon-made eyepiece. The firmware update will apply to all current models but not to the first-gen eVscope and eQuinox, which lack the computing power, Unistellar confirmed. 

These reflector telescopes focus light on a Sony IMX CMOS sensor, with an onboard computer taking multiple short exposures of objects in the night sky and stacking them. Vivid Vision is an additional feature to the Enhanced Vision digital image processing suite, which presents a colorful, detail-rich, deep black image on smartphones and tablets via the Unistellar app. Vivid Vision promises more authentic colors of space, revealing the nuanced colors of stars, nebulae and galaxies.

“Recreating colors with sensors that see only three colors has been a big challenge since the beginning of digital photography,” said Laurent Marfisi, co-founder and CEO of Unistellar, to Digital Camera World in a press briefing. 

“Vivid Vision uses the Gaia database to better match the actual spectrum of colors of the universe.” The reddish nebula of the Cigar Galaxy (M82) and the blue and yellow of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) are two of the objects expected to benefit. “Stars in globular clusters like Hercules (M31) will look more red because they are older stars, which will help users to understand the stories of the universe,” said Marfisi. The current tech makes these stars appear white.

About 25,000 Unistellar smart telescopes have been sold so far, and its deep analysis and reprocessing of user images has directly led to the development of Vivid Vision, said the company. “We have relied on the millions of images shared with us from our users,” said Marfisi. 

Unistellar, which recently launched its Cosmic Card Collection to encourage regular observing, is currently running a campaign on Kickstarter for its augmented reality Envision binoculars, which will go on sale in 2025. 

If you're after a serious, high-end smart telescope but don't want to pay the high prices for Unistellar's 'Expert' range—chiefly the eVscope 2 and the eVscope eQuinox 2—the Odyssey is an attractive option in the company’s drop-down 'Discovery' range.

An entry-level smart telescope, Odyssey is essentially an all-in-one astrophotography rig. It captures light from the night sky and lets it fall only onto a camera sensor, taking long exposures of faint objects. It automatically stacks them as it observes, applying post-processing algorithms to build a clean and colorful image that appears in a smartphone app.

This is deep-sky astrophotography made easy. However, its feature set ranks it a notch below the company's Odyssey Pro. Compared to its pricier sister, the Odyssey lacks a Nikon-made electronic eyepiece, so it can't be used in any way as a traditional telescope. That makes it the same as much more affordable smart telescopes like the ZWO Seestar S50 and Vaonis Vespera II. However, here you get bigger, better optics, and superior build quality. It's also a Newtonian reflector-type of telescope (rival brands of smart telescopes are all lens-based refractors).

With a lower price, can the Odyssey compete for the title of the best smart telescope in 2024? Here’s everything you need to know about the Odyssey Pro. 

Unistellar Odyssey: Specifications

Unistellar Odyssey: Price

The Odyssey sells for $2,099 / £1,849, with frequent discounts available. That compares to the Odyssey Pro, which sells for $3,599 / £3,149. Both smart telescopes are in Unistellar’s 'Discovery' range.

The Odyssey and Odyssey Pro are essentially smaller and more affordable versions of the eVscope eQuinox II and eVscope II smart telescopes in Unistellar's 'Expert' range, which sell for $2,499 / £2,199 and $4,899 / £3,999, respectively.

For those after a Unistellar smart telescope for the lowest price possible, the choice is mostly between the Odyssey and the eVscope eQuinox 2. Neither has an electronic eyepiece, but where they differ is in their mirrors and megapixels. While the Odyssey has an 85mm mirror and 3.4 megapixels, the eVscope eQuinox 2 boasts a 114mm mirror and 6.2 megapixels.

Optional accessories for the Odyssey comprise a custom-fit backpack for $299 / £269 and a smart solar filter for $199 / £179. The latter is essential for capturing sunspots.

Unistellar Odyssey: Design & Handling

It’s not the smallest smart telescope around, but on the Odyssey, that’s a good thing. At its core, it’s a 3.35-inch/85mm reflector telescope. Its Nikon-made optics have a focal length of 320mm and a field of view of 34 x 45 arcminutes. Thanks to its lack of an eyepiece, it’s a shade lighter than the Odyssey Pro, so even easier to maneuver and store. Perhaps that’s its best design trick; whereas Unistellar’s eVscope telescopes are big and bulky (and brilliant), the Odyssey is significantly smaller and easier to live with. One issue with reflector telescopes is the need for occasional repositioning of their mirrors (a maintenance task called collimating). Happily, that’s not the case for the Odyssey, a closed unit with mirrors that won’t ever need tinkering with. 

Odyssey’s small size does mean it has a short battery life. At five hours, it has the same problem as its rivals, the Vanois Vespera 2 and Seestar S50. It’s also a shame that although it recharges via a USB-C slot, it can’t be used with just any USB-C cable—it has to be the wall adaptor cable supplied in the box. 

Its proprietary tripod is also initially irritating, considering how many tripods photographers tend to have lying around. At least it’s of excellent quality. Strong, sturdy, and able to extend to four sections, it’s super-steady and has a built-in bubble level. It also folds up nicely to fit in a camera bag. 

Setting up this telescope is so simple. Switch it on and pair it with a smartphone, and within minutes, its ‘smart star finder’ system has it imaging the sky, cross-referencing the stars it can see with images in its database (with a little help from the GPS in your phone). You then choose an object from a list, and the Odyssey will slew to it and autofocus upon it. 

There’s a search function if you want to find something specific, though it would also be nice to have the option to move around a virtual representation of the night sky and geographically choose objects for Odyssey to slew to. After all, if you know the night sky, you’ll also know when an object is behind a tree, so having a sky map to navigate makes more sense than a list. It would also be an excellent way for beginners to learn how to navigate the night sky. 

Once an object is slewed to, a press of the ‘Enhanced Vision’ button sets Odyssey on its imaging journey, taking multiple short exposures to stack atop one another, creating an ever-improving merged image in the app. At any time, it’s possible to save the entire 16:9 image to a smartphone or share a square image to social media, the latter complete with framing and a caption that includes basic image parameters. Toggle on an option in the app’s settings and lossless PNG, TIFF, and FITS  files can be saved to Odyssey’s 64GB hard disk for post-processing. 

Unistellar Odyssey: Performance

When it comes to pure imaging quality, the Odyssey is superior to its more affordable rivals, yet inferior to the pricer Odyssey Pro. That’s no surprise, but we did notice that some bright objects caused problems. 

All the images we created were sharp, but some lacked ultimate detail. For example, it overexposed the Andromeda Galaxy—albeit while also skillfully revealing subtle dust lanes in its outskirts. Albireo, a famously contrasty double star in Cygnus, proved impossible to resolve as two stars in Odyssey’s image. 

Other images, including those of globular clusters, open clusters, and galaxies, impressed. What all Unistellar’s images have in common is peerless contrast. Its ‘Deep dark technology’ clearly works, with lusciously black backgrounds to star fields and celestial objects that rival brands cannot match. 

Also unlike other smart telescopes, Unistellar’s range has multi-depth tech, allowing them to image planets and the moon and deep-sky objects. Essentially, that means swapping from its usual long exposures to high-frame-rate imaging. 

We tried it on Saturn, the only planet visible after sunset during the review. Saturn’s rings are seen only side-on for the next few years, so the view isn’t as good as it could be, but we were able to make them out in a reasonably fuzzy image. 

For the moon, Odyssey excels, producing sharp, contrasty images of our nearest celestial neighbor.

Unistellar Odyssey: Verdict

The most affordable Unistellar smart telescope is a joy to use. Setup takes minutes and imaging celestial objects of all kinds is easy. There’s a noticeable drop in imaging quality compared to the Odyssey Pro, and there’s no eyepiece for traditional astronomy, but this easy-to-store smart telescope is a great way to beat light pollution and try your hand at deep-sky astrophotography for a fraction of the fuss. 

Alternatives

Beaverlab has just launched a new crowdfunding campaign for the Finder TW2 – an upgraded model of its groundbreaking Finder TW1 telescope and this time, it's harnessing the power of AI.

Beaverlab is a company born from a passion for technology and creativity with the mission of promoting human exploration. This is evident in its beautifully designed optical products, from microscopes and telescopes to its recent telephoto lens for mobile phones, each has an element of creativity and fun and caters to the enthusiastic beginner as well as the professional.

The new Finder TW2 is no different and claims to harness premium optics and the latest technology to enable users to explore the stars. 

The 82mm aperture coupled with the 500mm focal length and 29x zoom capability facilitates high-definition 8MP photos and 4K video, capturing intricate details of the cosmos.

The Finder TW2 is an all-in-one telescope meaning it has everything you need right out of the box, and no extra equipment is required. The previous model needed a smartphone to act as the screen and capture device, whereas now the TW2 has an inbuilt 5-inch touchscreen and DS1 image capture device. It is also worth noting that the DS1 image capture device can be used on other telescopes, which is a very economical touch.

An all-new 1/1.8-inch starlight CMOS sensor is drastically larger than that in the TW1 which enables the capture of more light, enhancing performance in low-light conditions and providing better image quality with less noise. This is vital for astrophotography, as often shooting environments are less than ideal!

Founder of Beaverlab Simon Fang states, “Exploring the cosmos should not be exclusive to the affluent or technically skilled. Our state-of-the-art optical telescope revolutionizes stargazing by merging superior optical precision with exceptional affordability. Engineered to be lightweight and highly intuitive, it caters equally to seasoned astronomers and beginners. This latest telescope addresses the traditional barriers of cost and complexity, offering a transformative tool that democratizes access to the night sky for all".

As with most modern technological devices, AI plays a pivotal role in powering new and improved features. The Finder TW2 AI features include "CCM (Color Correction Matrix) which enhances color accuracy for true-to-life images, CA (Chromatic Aberration) Correction which minimizes color distortion for sharp and clear visuals, WDR (Wide Dynamic Range) which balances lighting conditions to capture details in both bright and dark areas, MCTF (Motion Compensated Temporal Filter) ensuring clear and sharp images, even in motion, Noise Reduction which reduces image noise for cleaner, more detailed photographs, and finally Dehazing, which enhances image clarity by reducing haze and atmospheric interference".

Other notable features include anti-shake, compact form factor, real-time photo adjustments, and advanced image processing.

Above: Sample images taken with the Beaverlab Finder TW2

It also must be noted that although primarily marketed as a telescope to view the stars, it is also more than capable of capturing on-planet subjects, such as wildlife and distant landscapes.

This small and incredibly smart telescope is packed full of features and you may be forgiven for thinking it comes with a premium price tag. But staying true to its brand values, the Beaverlab Finder TW2 is available to back on Indiegogo now for an early bird special price of just $329 / £257 including the DS1 camera, and will have an RRP of $499 / £390 on release (Australian pricing to be confirmed).

Editor's note: As with all crowdfunding projects, there is no guarantee that the final product will match the early depictions in the campaign – or that the final product will be completed or delivered at all. DCW does not endorse this or any other crowdfunding campaign.

You be interested in our guides to the best telescopes for astrophotography, the best lenses for astrophotography, and the best cameras for astrophotography.

DwarfLab, makers of the now-discontinued Dwarf II compact smart telescope, has released the long-awaited Dwarf 3.

Its predecessor, the Dwarf II, was the first affordable smart telescope at $500, and became a favorite among amateur astronomers. 

Available to pre-order now for shipment in September, the Dwarf III claims to be the world’s lightest smart telescope on the market, and is retailing at $479 / £388.

A smart telescope is a telescope that can automatically track the sky and capture images of deep–sky targets such as the Milky Way, nebulae, or other wonders in our cosmos. 

If astronomy isn’t your thing, smart telescopes are also a great tool when watching wildlife, able to help you track moving animals, or elusive ones.

Comparable to the size of a dictionary, this is a piece of kit for the active traveler, with the ability to shoot one billion pixel panorama photos.

It has a 3mm aperture apochromatic lens with a periscope mechanism, doubling the light–gathering capacity compared to the Dwarf II.

The Dwarf 3 also comes with the powerful STARVIS 2 sensor, increasing its pixel size by 90.24%, reaching 2µm.

The built-in features include:

VIS filter – covering the 430–650nm range for daytime terrestrial photography

Astro filter – extends to the infrared range (430–690nm), ideal for astronomy and low-light photography

Dual–band filter – targets OIII (500.7nm), Hβ(486nm) and Hα (656.3nm) wavelengths, reducing moonlight and city pollution for clearer emission nebula shots

The Dwarf 3 also supports output in four image formats: JPG, PNG, TIFF, and FITS.

If you don’t feel like staying up all night to watch celestial activity, you can schedule shooting using your smartphone, which can also be used to connect to and start the telescope.

The telescope comes with a carrying bag, complete with magnetic solar filters and a pouch for them, USB–C cable, and a wipe cloth.

Take a look at our guides to the best smart telescopes, the best telescopes for astrophotography, and the best telescopes for beginners. 

In an attempt to find Earth-like planets in the Universe, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch its Plato (PLanetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) space mission in 2026. 

The 26 cameras that will be used on the Plato spacecraft are now being integrated at the Space Centre and Optics facility, run by European space technology group OHB (Otto Hydraulik Bremen), in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. 

With each camera capable of 81.4MP images, the overall spacecraft will ve capable of 2 billion-pixel images – a world first in any space mission. 

One by one the cameras will be attached to the optical bench, the surface that keeps all the cameras pointed in the right direction, and the first camera has now been successfully attached. 

Planter hunter Plato will use 24 "normal" cameras and a pair of "fast" cameras to look at more than 200,000 stars and the rocky planets orbiting them. Specifically, Plato will discover and study planets in orbits up to the 'Goldilocks' region, the habitable zone around the star where the temperature is just right for liquid to exist on a planet's surface. 

"Plato will characterize hundreds of rocky (including Earth twins), icy or giant planets by providing exquisite measurements of their radii (3% precision), masses (better than 10% precision) and ages (10% precision)," says the ESA. 

"This will revolutionize our understanding of planet formation and the evolution of planetary systems, as well as the potential habitability of these diverse worlds."

The cameras acquire images every 25 seconds and have a field of view of 1,037 square degrees. They have been grouped into 4 sets, each set pointing outwards at a 9.2-degree angle, allowing for a total field of view of 2,232 square degrees. This means that about 5% of the whole sky can be observed simultaneously.

The fast cameras have a cadence 10 times higher than that of the normal ones, with an image being captured every 2.5 seconds. They are only capable of detecting bright stars but are extremely useful for navigation.

One of the fast cameras has a red filter and one a blue, to help distinguish between starlight reflected off the exoplanet surface and emission from the exoplanet itself, aiding with more accurate solar mapping.

Plato's Instrument System Engineer, Yves Levillain said:

"Away from the Sun’s brightness we expect to be able to detect the presence of Earth-like exoplanets, where life as we know it might be able to develop, and even to perform stellar seismology, gathering evidence of ‘starquakes’ in the stars we observe."

If you feel like photographing the stars, why not take a look at our guide to the best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography. Also check out the best star tracker camera mounts for astrophotography. 

Smart telescopes like the Odyssey Pro are all about astrophotography. With a camera sensor instead of an optical eyepiece, the Odyssey Pro takes long exposures of the night sky and stacks them to create an ever-improving image that you can check the progress of on your smartphone. In that way, it’s no different from the other small smart telescopes available, chiefly the ZWO Seestar S50 and Vaonis Vespera II. However, it’s a big step up from its rivals in three ways. A Nikon-made eyepiece means it can be used just like a traditional telescope – unlike its rivals – it’s a significantly better telescope than the others, optically speaking, and, of course, it’s much more expensive. 

Is it the best smart telescope in 2024? For some, it could be, but while it’s certainly one of the best telescopes for astrophotography, there are some nuances that may restrict its appeal. Here’s everything you need to know about the Odyssey Pro. 

Unistellar Odyssey Pro: Specifications

Unistellar Odyssey Pro: Price

At $3,599 / £3,149, the Odyssey Pro is the most expensive choice in Unistellar’s new Discovery range (the other being the eyepiece-less Odyssey, which costs $2,099 / £1,849). It’s a step down from the eVscope eQuinox II and eVscope II in the French company’s Expert range. Optional accessories include a solar filter ($199 / £179) and a custom-made backpack complete with a dedicated tripod compartment and multiple storage pockets ($299 / £269).

Unistellar Odyssey Pro: Design & Handling

The Odyssey Pro is easy to store and highly portable. At a mere 5kg, it can be stored on a bookshelf or put in a cupboard when not in use. However, its small size does come at a cost. It only keeps shooting for five hours, though it can be attached to a portable battery. 

At the core of this product is a 3.35-inch/85mm reflector telescope with a focal length of 320mm and a field of view of 34 x 45 arcminutes. 

The Odyssey Pro is incredibly easy to use. It arrives with a proprietary tripod and must be set up and leveled. Then, it’s just a case of firing it up along with the accompanying app. It plate-solves with the stars above and, in conjunction with your phone's GPS, finds its place in space and time. Fully aligned, it then slews to any object you care to choose from a list in the colorful, easy-to-use app. 

The need to collimate the mirrors, which is standard on all other reflector telescopes, has also been dropped; the Odyssey Pro is a closed unit that ought never to need its mirrors tinkered with. 

Like the eVscope, the Odyssey Pro includes a Nikon-made eyepiece. It’s excellent, offering OLED-style deep blacks and vivid colors, though it’s not strictly necessary given that all of the Odyssey Pro’s images display on Unistellar’s new app. The Odyssey Pro is unique in Unistellar’s line-up in offering Nikon High Precision Optics, which uses an OLED micro-display technology for ultra-high contrast. However, during our review, we didn’t find ourselves using the eyepiece much at all.

Unistellar Odyssey Pro: Performance

Although supposedly a drop-down from its ‘Expert’ range, there are some really useful features on the Odyssey Pro that make it much easier to use than previous iterations of Unistellar’s smart telescopes. For starters, Stellar Autofocus means there’s now no need to manually focus, something that has to be done using a Bahtinov mask on the eVscopes. It’s also now got Unistellar's proprietary Multi-Depth tech, which allows it to switch instantly from observing deep-sky objects to planets, the moon, and the sun.

It’s got the same Smart Star Finder tech as before, which plate-solves images of the stars to align with the night sky. It also uses Enhanced Vision to stack multiple images and Deep Dark tech to keep the resulting composite images contrasty. 

Imaging is simple, although slightly different from other Unistellar smart telescopes. It live stacks and presents an ever-clearer image, with patience paying off; leave it imaging a galaxy for an hour, and it will tease out dust lanes (though the image impresses after as little as 30 seconds). Either way, the Odyssey Pro will show you deep sky objects in a clarity that no optical telescope can rival. If you live under any kind of light pollution, that goes triple. 

This telescope’s Multi-Depth tech is its new ability to swap between long-exposure imaging (deep sky objects) and high-frame-rate imaging (sun, moon, and planets). Images impress from both techniques, the exception being planets. Only Jupiter was available during our test. It appeared blurred and lacking in detail, though that may have been due to poor atmospheric conditions. 

In a new feature that astrophotographers looking for a grab-and-go option will love, lossless  PNG, TIFF or FITS  files can now be easily accessed on the telescope’s 64GB hard disk for post-processing in software like Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, PixInsight, and Siril. 

Unistellar Odyssey Pro: Verdict

Although the Odyssey Pro delights at most turns, its high price does tempt us to consider the much more affordable step-down option, the Odyssey. For a hefty saving, the only sacrifices appear to be a drop from 4.1 to 3.7 megapixels and that Nikon eyepiece. However, if you want a small, easy-to-store smart telescope that travels well and can be used out in the field—and has the option of traditional eyepiece observing—the Odyssey Pro is hard to beat. 

Alternatives

Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has beaten its own record for detecting and photographing the most distant known galaxy.

The newly-discovered galaxy is called JADES-GS-z14-0, and is the earliest ever seen collection of stars in the universe. 

The telescope, which makes even the best cameras for astrophotography look like children's toys, captured the galaxy as it was 290 million years after the Big Bang, meaning that if the universe is 13.8 billion years old, we’re observing the galaxy when the cosmos was only 2 percent of its current age.  

This is not only an incredible scientific and technological achievement, but it could also unlock the mysteries of how the universe began. 

The James Webb Space Telescope, named after James E. Webb, the administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968, uses its huge 6.5m wide primary mirror and high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments to view objects too old, distant or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. 

According to scientists at NASA, the JADES-GS-z14-0 appears to be surprisingly bright and 1,600 light years across.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one year - and that's a big big distance. Light whizzes through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometres) per second, and therefore a 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometres) per year.

Scientists use the unit to measure light because it allows astronomers to determine how far back they are viewing. Because light takes time to travel to our eyes, what we are viewing in the night sky has already happened. When you are observing something one light year away, you’re seeing it exactly as it appeared one year ago.

The galaxy is so bright it is believed to be several hundreds of million times the mass of our Sun, and scientists are perplexed as to how nature could have created it in less than 300 million years. The telescope also detected a significant amount of oxygen, suggesting that the galaxy is quite mature.

Drs Stefano Carniani and Kevin Hainline, authors of the report said:

“The presence of oxygen so early in the life of this galaxy is a surprise and suggests that multiple generations of very massive stars had already lived their lives before we observed the galaxy.”

Over the last couple of years, scientists have used the telescope to explore what astronomers mysteriously call Cosmic Dawn - the period of the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, where the first galaxies were born.

• A star is born in new James Webb telescope photo to celebrate 1st birthday
• James Webb Space Telescope images are so beautiful they bring scientists to tears
• NASA captures a Cosmic Tarantula with James Webb Space Telescope
• James Webb Telescope reveals stunning newborn star

The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, the largest ever built, has completed its journey from California to the summit of Cerro Pachón, Chile, where it will be installed in the Vera C Rubin Observatory. 

The LSST is a groundbreaking instrument that took two decades to build, and will now take up its residency in the observatory – which has been jointly founded by the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy’s Office. 

Once installed, the camera will be an integral tool in the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, beginning in late 2025, taking massive detailed images of the southern hemisphere sky for a decade. 

The project is part of Rubin Observatory’s mission to solve longstanding scientific mysteries of the sky, building the most comprehensive timelapse view of our universe that anyone has ever seen. 

The highly sensitive camera will be able to produce detailed images with a field of view seven times wider than the full moon, and will fuel advances and discoveries in many areas of science. The camera will potentially be able to explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy, map the Milky Way and survey the solar system.

"The arrival of the cutting-edge LSST Camera in Chile brings us a huge step closer to science that will address today's most pivotal questions in astrophysics," said Kathy Turner, DOE’s program manager for Rubin Observatory.

Safe in its custom-built container, the truck-sized LSST Camera was transported on a 747 cargo plane, then loaded onto multiple vehicles, before arriving at the summit of Cerro Pachón, where it was given a thorough inspection by the observatory team.

"Our goal was to make sure the camera not only survived, but arrived in perfect condition," said Kevin Reil, Observatory Scientist at Rubin. "Initial indications, including the data collected by the data loggers, accelerometers, and shock sensors suggest we were successful."

Read more about the construction of the LSST camera

If  you're obsessed with the night sky, check out our guide to the best cameras for astrophotography. We've also put together a guide to the best lenses for astrophotography. 

There is no more enjoyable smart telescope than the Vaonis Vespera II (also called the  Vaonis Vespera 2), making it easily one of the best telescopes for astrophotography for beginners and advanced amateurs wanting to both cut down on hassle and save time. Affordable smart telescopes are all the rage – check our ZWO Seestar S50 review for proof of that – and the Vaonis Vespera II just about sneeks into that category. It is, however, a class above its more affordable rival, offering a superior build quality, much higher resolution images and a slick app called Singularity. 

With a longer focal length, upgraded focal ratio and a wider field of view than its predecessor, the Vaonis Vespera II is easy to use and lightweight enough to travel with. Is it the best smart telescope in 2024? For some users, it absolutely will be – but there are things you need to know before making a decision. Here’s everything you need to know about the Vaonis Vespera II. 

Vaonis Vespera II: Specifications

Vaonis Vespera II: Price

At $1,690 / £1,398, the Vespera II largely retains the price tag of its previous iteration, the Vespera. This makes it a mid-range smart telescope. It costs considerably more than the ZWO Seestar—albeit with more advanced features and a higher resolution—yet significantly less than the Unistellar eVscope 2, Unistellar eVscope eQuinox 2, the latest Odyssey and Odyssey Pro, or the upcoming Celestron Origin. 

Optional accessories include a mini tripod ($99/£90), a larger adjustable tripod ($149/£135), a backpack ($149/£159), a hygrometer sensor ($99/£109) for dealing with fog, a light pollution filter ($199/£209), a dual-band filter ($399/£370) and a solar filter ($99/£129). 

Vaonis Vespera II: Design & Handling

At just under 11lbs/5kg, Vespera II is reasonably easy to carry, whether by hand or in a backpack. An immediately pleasing change from the original Vespera is the swapping-put of a proprietary charger for a USB-C slot, making it much easier to charge on the go. It also makes it easy to hook up a portable battery to keep it going for long observing sessions, which helps overcome the limitations of its (albeit upgraded) built-in battery, which lasts about four hours. 

Vespera II’s underbelly contains a standard tripod thread, so you can use it with whatever large photographic tripod you already own. You can buy two types of tripods for the Vespera II, and while both are pack-down to a relatively small size, they don’t lift the telescope too high. 

The curved lines of the Vespera II’s chassis lend it an Apple-esque look. It also handles incredibly well. When ‘parked,’ the Vespera II retains an oval shape, which is easy to store in any small backpack. Position it level on the ground (it’s really important to keep it completely level) on a tripod, and the motorized telescope tube quietly reveals itself and begins to check for stars to align with. 

Vaonis Vespera II: Performance

The major upgrade on the Vespera II is its image sensor. While its forebear managed just two-megapixel images, this iteration’s Sony IMX585 sensor ups detail to eight megapixels. To see the results, it’s necessary to attach a smartphone to the Vespera II’s WiFi network via the Singularity network. With its star pattern recognition software in full swing, it aligns with the night sky, and the app presents choices for what to observe. 

Once it’s slewed to that object and focused upon it, it takes 10-second images of it and live-stacks them, removing noise and increasing brightness and color. We tried it with the Black Eye, Pinwheel, and Cigar galaxies, achieving excellent results within minutes. 

However, teasing-out the intricate dust lanes and other details can take over an hour of observing (though it’s easy enough just to leave it running while you do something else). Open clusters and globular clusters take just minutes to max out. Meanwhile, the moon proved a hugely enjoyable target to explore – a definite improvement on the original Vespera. Images are saved to the telescope’s 25GB hard disk. 

The eight-megapixel images aren’t Hubble-standard, of course, though few will choose to export the results as lossless TIFF and FITS files for post-processing. There’s also a new CovalENS ‘live mosaic capture’ that can capture large objects—such as the Andromeda galaxy and the Pleiades—by stitching together four separate images. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to test this feature. 

One accessory worth investing in is the solar filter. Simple to click into place, all you have to do is select the sun on the Singularity app, and the telescope unfolds to 45 degrees before requesting the solar filter. It then slews to, and autofocuses on, the sun in seconds. Now is a great time to study the sun, whose surface is regularly covered in sunspots because of its heightened magnetic activity (solar maximum). Vespera II captured some excellent solar images showing plenty of sunspots.

Vaonis Vespera II: Verdict

If you’re looking for a smart telescope you can operate using your smartphone in a light-polluted city, stop looking. The perfect bridge product between the very affordable yet limited ZWO Seestar S50 and very pricey products from Unistellar and Celestron, the Vespera II offers impressive images of galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters that are surprisingly bright and colorful even when used in badly light-polluted skies. 

Quick to set up, easy to use, and with an app that adds to the simplicity, Vespera II is nevertheless a serious piece of astronomy observation hardware that will appeal just as much to the experienced amateur astronomer and astrophotographer looking to save time and make use of brief breaks in the weather as it will to beginners after something intuitive and easy to use. 

Alternatives

The act of pointing a manual camera at the vast night sky and capturing a long exposure photograph, also known as astrophotography, blossomed in popularity during the regular lockdown periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

When recording imaging of faint sources, it’s imperative that a camera is extremely low-noise, and able to detect the smallest number of light photons, and reports the quantity of light received accurately, especially for researchers at NASA. 

Superconducting cameras (SCAM) are ultra-fast photon-counting cameras developed by the European Space Agency, and work by being cooled to three-tenths of a degree Celcius above absolute zero. This enables its sensitive electronic detectors to pick up almost every photo of light. 

However, these cameras have historically not been widely applicable due to their smaller size, rarely exceeding a few thousand pixels, limiting their ability to capture high-resolution images.  

In a major breakthrough, researchers at The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the University of Colorado Boulder have recently shattered that barrier.

The team have developed a superconducting camera with 400,000 pixels, which could be used to detect faint astronomical signals in a wide range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to infrared.

This solution could be extremely useful in the search for Earth-like planets outside our solar system.

Researchers applied time-domain multiplexing technology to the interrogation of two-dimensional superconducting-nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) arrays.

“The individual SNSPD nanowires are arranged as intersecting rows and columns,” explains NASA. “When a photon arrives, the times it takes to trigger a row detector and a column detector are measured to ascertain which pixel sent the signal. This method allows the camera to efficiently encode its many rows and columns onto just a few readout wires instead of thousands of wires.”

Once the researchers tried this new way of encoding via readout wires, they quickly found that it became easy to construct superconducting cameras with extremely large numbers of pixels.

Technical lead Dr Bakhrom Oripov said "The big advance here is that the detectors are truly independent, so if you want a camera with more pixels, you just add more detectors to the chip."

Megapixels here we come?

Check out our best picks for astrophotography cameras and also lenses for astrophotography here. If it's telescopes you're interested look at our Best telescopes for astrophotography. 

Smart telescopes have only been around for a few years, but until the Seestar arrived, they were a high-end purchase for early adopters. Now, everyone can afford a smart telescope, thanks to the Seestar, which has become a word-of-mouth hit that threatens to trouble the best telescopes for astrophotography in 2024. Sold out in advance of April 8’s total solar eclipse in the USA, it can take images of both the sun and moon, and deep sky targets. 

Is it the best smart telescope in 2024? It’s not. Smart telescopes are available with better optics, costing many times the asking price of the Seestar, such as the Unistellar eVscope 2 and Vaonis Vespera. However, there’s no doubt that the Seestar is by far the best-value smart telescope around. 

That said, its optics are limited. Its 2 inches/50mm aperture suggests a wide-angle view of the night sky, but its Sony IMX462 image sensor – which reaches only HD quality – is so small that it actually has a narrow field of view. It also lacks high-end features. For example, there are no audio descriptions for the astronomical objects you observe, as you’ll find on most GoTo telescopes. Nor is there a citizen science option, as seen on other smart telescopes. 

Seestar comes from the Chinese manufacturer ZWO, which also makes high-speed and high-sensitivity astronomy cameras, telescopes, and other accessories for serious astronomy. 

Is this the smart telescope that grows the market for a new kind of smartphone-operated, astrophotography-centric telescope? Absolutely, and, in fact, it already has. Who needs an eyepiece? 

ZWO Seestar S50: Specifications

ZWO Seestar S50: Price

That ZWO is asking just $499 / £539 / AU$949 for the Seestar makes this a revolutionary product in the smart telescope market. It’s also been a huge reason for its success, with demand so high that at times Seestar has been difficult to get hold of. For context, the next most affordable smart telescope is the Vaonis Vespera II (the 2024 successor to the original Vaonis Vespera), which sells for $1,590 / £1,370. 

Despite its low price, Seestar has a carry case, a tripod, a USB-C cable, and a solar filter. 

ZWO Seestar S50: Design & Handling

Seestar is small and lightweight. At just 2.5 kg, it weighs about the same as a house brick, seven cans of beans, or half a cat. That hugely changes how this product is used because it can be easily put in a backpack or placed on a bookshelf. I’ve seen people store it in a cupboard in a campervan, ready to be brought outside on any clear night.

Its designers presumably foresaw this, providing L-shaped rubber pads on the underside corners to prevent scratches and slippage. Placed lowdown on one corner is the all-important USB-C slot for recharging, while on the back is the on/off switch along with four LEDs to let you know the battery status. There is no lens cap; the Seastar’s motorized arm parks itself while pointing downwards, thereby protecting the lens. 

On the undercarriage is a 3/8-inch tripod thread. Any photographic tripod can, therefore, be used to mount the Seestar, but an excellent-quality small two-section carbon fiber tripod is included. 

Although the (lack of) weight is useful when traveling, it does at least suggest that the Seestar won’t last as long as the more expensive – and far heavier – smart telescopes available. We’re also wary about it easily getting damaged through wear and tear. For now, the build quality seems good enough, particularly given its meager price. 

ZWO Seestar S50: Performance

Whether you're interested in capturing long-exposure images of deep sky objects, observing sunspots on our nearest star, or capturing the moon, the Seestar has you covered. The only thing it doesn't impress with is the planets. 

Core to the Seestar is its app, which is mostly intuitive and user-friendly. After a simple, quick set-up that involves leveling the tripod and the software plate-solving images of the stars to sync with the night sky, it slews to whatever target you choose in its built-in Sky Atlas planetarium software. You virtually compose the shot and then let the Seestar slew to it and begin taking 10-second images. The built-in light pollution filters work well on this setting, though 20-second and 30-second options are also available. It then live-stacks the image, which gets better over time. Faint objects, such as galaxies and nebula, are best left for over 30 minutes, while other, brighter objects max out after just a few minutes. You can even save each frame, post-process them and stack them yourself, which will appeal to budding astrophotographers with time on their hands. 

It’s possible to return to an object at any time –  even weeks or months later – to shoot more images of an object to add to your composite. It might make sense if you take Seestar to a particularly dark site. It’s problematic because the Seestar uses an alt-az mount, so the sensor’s rectangular composition twists, leading to blurred stars in the corners. In practice, that makes no difference to most small targets, only large frame-filling targets (such as the Andromeda galaxy).

The main drawbacks are that the Seestar captures in 2-megapixel resolution and portrait mode only, the latter unexpected and limiting. These are less of an issue for the sun and moon, which the Seestar excels at. Usually finding its targets easily – unless there are clouds – the moon is shown with impressive sharpness, while the sun, with the included solar filter in place, displays plenty of sunspots. On all targets, its electronic autofocus works well. 

As a bonus, the Seestar S50 can take some rather impressive images in daylight. It has a virtual directional keypad to move it into position, but once you've found your target, the auto-focus produces very sharp, balanced images (though you can manually tweak the brightness). 

ZWO Seestar S50: Verdict

Though it may not boast the highest resolution and comes with a few technical limitations, the Seestar makes up for them in affordability, ease of use, and sheer enjoyment. A casual device that’s hugely affordable, relatively speaking, it’s the perfect introduction to astronomy and astrophotography, particularly in light-polluted cities, because it will show you things you will never, ever see with any other kind of telescope. It’s not the best smart telescope around, but it’s definitely the most popular. 

Alternatives

Amazon's spring sale ended yesterday, but we are still spotting some great deals - including this big price drop on one of our favorite beginner telescopes. It's a no-frills device that will give you a powerful view of the night sky thanks to its bright 130mm diameter lens. With an overnight price drop of over £40, this Celestron telescope is now on offer for just £203.

The Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ is a complete kit with an optical tube assembly (OTA), anequatorial mount, two eyepieces – a 20mm and 10mm – which work with the optical system to provide magnifications and 33x and 65x, a red-dot finderscope to help you frame your subject, and a solidly-built stainless steel tripod. Furthermore, the bundle that Amazon has just cut the price on comes with a motorized drive, that allows you to track celestial objects as they appear to move across the night sky.

The supplied motor is good for tracking objects such as the moon, but it does not come with computerized control to guide you to a particular planet or star. However, this telescope is a great starting point for exploring our solar system, and the galaxies beyond.

Read more:
The best lenses for astrophotography

The best camera equipment for astrophotography

The best telescopes for astrophotography

The best CCD cameras for astrophotography

Best light pollution filters for astrophotography

The poor Hubble telescope has become a bit of a geriatric since the younger, higher-res James Webb Space Telescope started its mission. In its heyday it delivered images of space in never-before-seen quality, offering scientists and researchers wisdom than ever before on how the universe came to be. 

Almost 30 years after its launch, the Hubble telescope orbits much closer to Earth but it’s still delivering photos from Space - albeit lower res than the mighty JWST. 

In the latest image, the NGC 3384 galaxy is visible and although the slightly blurred image isn’t as jaw-dropping as other images from space, it still holds importance. The so-called elliptical galaxy is rounded in shape, shows few visible features and rarely shows recent start formations. These galaxies are dominated by old, aging red-hued stars unlike the Milky Way (a spiral galaxy) which is bursting with populations of young blue stars that create the spiral arms around its bright core. 

What’s interesting about this image is that at its center there appears to be a disc-like structure you would normally expect to see in a spiral galaxy, such as the Milky Way.   A central bar is thought to funnel material through and around a galaxy’s core helping to maintain and fuel activities and processes that occur.

In recent years, the Hubble Telescope has had to undergo maintenance so it's kept in a low orbit close to Earth so that it is safe and accessible for astronauts to repair and upgrade its components. To this day, the Hubble orbits the Earth at 17,000mph/27,000 kph, sees 15 sunrises every day and in its lifetime has traveled over 4 billion miles. The Hubble telescope may have been superseded by the JWST but its contribution to our understanding of space has been monumental. 

As the Hubble Telescope edges closer to retirement, it will continue to photograph space, informing astronomers and researchers of the secrets of the universe. 

Check out the best telescopes for astrophotography, and see our guide to all the best lenses for astrophotography

NASA has just released a mesmerizing image taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) capturing a massive star-forming region known as N79. Situated roughly 161,000 light years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. But although spanning more than 1,630 light years across, this colossal star-forming complex remains largely unexplored. 

The JWST uses a Mid-Infra Red Instrument to capture distant galaxies in such unprecedented derail, allowing scientists to develop a better understanding of how stars form and how the universe came to be. N79 is often considered to be a younger sibling of the 30 Doradus or Tarantula Nebula and remains a steadfast fascination to astronomers due to its exceptional star formation efficiency. 

• Improve your night-time photography game with one of the best telescopes for astrophotography

This latest colorful capture focuses on one of three giant molecular cloud complexes in which a humongous starbursts at the center. Gassy clouds are shown in orange, yellow and blue hues while the six large spikes appear due to the hexagon symmetry of the JWSP’s 18 primary mirror segments. 

Webb's MIRI, captures longer wavelengths of light, revealing the glowing gas and dust within N79 allowing astronomers to explore and understand the inner workings of these ginormous clouds. As mis-infrared light penetrates deeper than short wavelengths, it isn't absorbed or scattered by dust grains in the region which is why this image also reveals still-embedded protostars within the region.

Star-forming regions such as this are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. Star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy are not producing stars at the same furious rate as N79, and have a different chemical composition so these new images from the Webb telescope allow astronomers to compare and contrast start formation in N79 with that of early, distant galaxies. 

As the JWSP continues to unravel mysteries of the Cosmos, it provides scientists with more information than ever before and the general republic with jaw-dropping images that show just how magical our universe is.

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Vaonis has added a new Mark II version of its Vespera smart telescope. The Vespera II offers higher resolution over the original Vespera, and other enhancments, in the same space-aged design as before.

Smart telescopes are becoming the modern way of seeing the stars. With built-in cameras, and remote control operation from your phone or tablet, you don't even need to go outside in the cold to explore the universe. 

The new model become the third to in the Vaonis Vespera range - offering a step-up in spec from the Vespera which was announced in 2021 which it replaces. It is less expensive than the Vespera Pro which although announced late last year has still to go on sale. Vaonis also makes the more advanced Stellina smart telescope, and the soon-to-be-launched simpler Hyperia.

The key attraction of the Vespera II is the boost of resolution over its predecessor, offering a four times increase in native resolution to 8.3 megapixels from its larger Sony IMX 585 sensor. Vaonis's proprietary CovalENS technology increases resolution further to 24 megapixels using  a multiple exposure technique.

The focal length of the telescope has been increased to 250mm from 200mm, while the aperture remains 50mm. The Vespera II is the same weight and size, tipping the scales at 5kg - but as a consequence battery capacity is reduced to four hours operation (down from eight).

The launch provides that competition and choice is hotting up in the emerging smart telescope model, with Unistellar launching two new models earlier this month, and with traditional telescope specialists Celestron introducing its first-ever smart telescope.

The price of the new Vaonis model is slightly more expensive than the original Vespera, and you no longer get a tripod thrown in with the deal. The Vespera II goes on sale this week for $1,590 / £1,370. 

Check out our guides to the best smart telescopes, and to the best computerized telescopes

Looking out into the stars has its complications, as all amateur astronomers have learned over the years while attempting to align their scopes with distant celestial objects. This has become, if anything, harder in recent years as we have come to depend on apps to act as star charts – something I remember from standing out in my dad's back garden last summer (sadly I live in the city so it's only visiting the countryside in which stargazing becomes possible).

Celestron, which is the biggest brand in telescopes, has created what might be the perfect solution to both parts of the problem my dad and I were having; aiming the telescope and our eyes adjusting to the light. The Celestron Origin, is the company's first smart telescope, and features a 6.4 megapixel Sony IMX178 CMOS sensor so the image can be enjoyed on the smartphone – or indeed tablet/smart TV/projector – rather than through the eyepiece.

The telescope itself is built around a Celestron version of the Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph (RASA) f/2.2 optical system designed for digital optics. That makes it 474-times as able to gather light as the human eye according to Celestron.

The bit of using a tripod which takes longest – aligning, aiming, and focusing – are all handled by the Celestron Origin. StarSense checks the sky and autonomously focuses and aligns once the tripod is set up.

The company has, they tell us, put a user-friendly interface on it (whether it'll be one of the best smart telescopes remains to be seen), though you can already see screenshots at retailers who are offering pre-orders.

Because the smart system can relay images to any smart display, the telescope could have uses in the home and classroom. It is a potential replacement for the best cameras for astrophotography and, by its nature, builds in a star tracker (a device which keeps adjusting your telescope's position to compensate for the planet's motion).

The internals are powered by a battery and can run for up to six hours, with the processing power of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, and outputting 3096 x 2080 pixel images. That's 1.48 arcsec/pixel resolution. There are USB-A ports and Ethernet for removing the raw files should you want to process them thoroughly, but of course sharing options are all there for app-powered viewing.

As mentioned, you can pre-order now, but don't expect to get your hands on it until Q2 – still not that long to wait.

We keep a guide to the best telescopes for beginners, and the best telescopes for astrophotography.

French smart telescope maker Unistellar has launched two new smart telescopes at CES 2024. 

The Unistellar Odyssey ($2,499/£2,199) and Odyssey Pro ($3,999/£3,499) join the eQuinox 2 and eVscope 2 in the company's four-strong lineup of smart telescopes. Both can be aligned and controlled remotely using a newly developed smartphone app.

While Unistellar's two legacy smart telescopes – the eVscope 2 and eQuinox 2 – deal primarily in dim and distant deep sky objects such as galaxies, nebula, and star clusters, the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro can also image the solar system. Unistellar also reports that it has surpassed 10,000 sales of its smart telescopes. 

Both the new smart telescopes are 3.35-inch/85mm reflector telescopes with a focal length of 320mm. Smaller and more affordable than their 4.5-inch/114mm reflector/450 focal length forebears, the two new smart telescopes use Unistellar's proprietary Multi-Depth Technology, which allows the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro to switch instantly from observing deep-sky objects to planets and the moon. They each have a field of view of 34 x 45 arcminutes and a battery life of five hours. 

While the Odyssey doesn't have an eyepiece, the Odyssey Pro adds one that, like the eVscope 2, has a Nikon-made eyepiece. The Odyssey Pro also increases the resolution of its astrophotography from the Odyssey's 3.4 megapixels to 4.1 megapixels. 

"They represent the ultimate technological innovation in telescopes," said Laurent Marfisi, co-founder and CEO of Unistellar, to Digital Camera World in a press briefing. "They provide people who are not familiar with astronomy or with space exactly the same kind of meaningful and emotional experience as people who already have knowledge about astronomy." 

He added that the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro are designed to help people curious about the night sky but have no idea where to start. "People don't know what's out there in space, so we're bridging that gap with an app that is easier to use and hardware that is super-powerful but even more user-friendly than before," said Marfisi. 

The Odyssey and Odyssey Pro are available now from the Unistellar website. In April, Unistellar will also sell the Odyssey Pro Red Edition (£3,999). Both the eVscope 2 and eQuinox 2 will continue to be sold. 

Read more: 

The best telescopes

The best camera for astrophotography

The best CCD cameras for astrophotography

The best lenses for astrophotography

The best light pollution filters

Late last month NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had switched itself to 'safe mode' because of a problem with one of its last remaining functional gyroscopes. In the past, the agency has mounted spectacular missions to save the legendary optical device using the versatile Space Shuttle. However, with the fleet now retired NASA is looking to other options, and it seems SpaceX is interested.

Astrophotography lovers have enjoyed the thousands of stunning images the Hubble telescope has caught since its launch in 1990, especially since the daring 1993 STS-61, a ten-day servicing mission that had over 35 hours of spacewalks. That mission, and four subsequent servicing missions that kept the Hubble in operation far longer than expected, all relied on the Shuttle and its airlock, but it's now out of action. What can SpaceX offer?

SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk and Tom Mueller, has grabbed a lot of media attention recently for their 'rapid unscheduled disassembly' (what everyone else calls an explosion) of their biggest experimental rocket, Starship. However, the company has also more-or-less perfected a smaller rocket, the Falcon, and developed a crew capsule, called Dragon, which has been used to send crews to the ISS 38 times, making a pretty strong case for private companies handling NASA missions.

Let's face it the management of some of these enterprises is not short of ego, either, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Jared Isaacman, Astronaut and CEO of a space enterprise called @Shift4, suggested that NASA "Put us in coach" on Twitter(X).

Realistically things are not as simple as the money men immediately suggest. The Shuttle had an airlock and arm to manipulate the Hubble in need of repair, while the Dragon capsule was not designed to be home to a crew for such a long period.

On the plus side, times have changed since the original Hubble gyros and computer modules were installed; systems the size of a refrigerator are considerably smaller these days.

It is also possible that – since the Hubble can limp on with its remaining two (of the original six) gyros, a robotic mission could somehow latch on and push it back into a good orbit (it is gradually decaying toward Earth). 

Just as the 1993 mission revitalized interest in the manned space program after the Challenger disaster, showing the need for humans in space, there is the worry whether success – however unlikely – for robotics here might be a shot across the bows for any future Mars mission, and we do eventually want to see pictures of Mars taken by humans (and we want to know what camera they choose).

In the meantime read more about Nasa's new moon camera, and which is the best action camera for use in difficult environments (if not, perhaps, space)

In yet another jaw-dropping discovery,  the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just unveiled a mesmerizing image of a luminous dust and gas cloud billowing from a newborn star. It showcases the intricate details of a celestial phenomenon associated with the birth of stars known as Herbig-Haro objects which come into existence when stellar winds or jets of gas from these nascent stars collide with nearby gas and dust at high speeds, generating shockwaves. 

Since the launch of the JWST in December 2021 we have been continually blessed by mind-blowing images of a fiery space hourglass to out-of-this-world photos of distant spiral galaxies. The newly released image captured by Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), highlights the dominance of Herbig Haro object 797 (HH 797) in the lower half, situated near the young open star cluster IC 348. 

• Fancy yourself as an astronomer? Check out the best telescopes for astrophotography and browse a range to suit all budgets!

This stellar cocoon is found around 1,000 light years away on the eastern edge of the Perseus dark cloud complex - a constellation containing thousands of galaxies making it one of the biggest objects in the known universe. In the top section of the image, you can see bright infrared objects believed to host two additional protostars.

Infrared imaging is a powerful tool for studying newborn stars and their outflows, as it can penetrate the gas and dust clouds that surround them. The infrared emission of the star's outflows allows scientists to observe Herbig-Haro objects with precision using Webb's sensitive infrared instruments. Webb excels at capturing the infrared light emitted by molecules, including molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide, excited by turbulent conditions, providing a visual representation of the outflows' structure.

Ground-based observations had previously indicated that HH 797's cold molecular gas exhibited a distinctive distribution, with red-shifted gas moving away to the south (bottom right) and blue-shifted gas moving toward the north (bottom left). Researchers had also noted a velocity gradient across the outflow, suggesting rotation. However, the newly released higher-resolution image from the JWST unveils a surprising revelation.

HH 797 is composed of two nearly parallel outflows, each associated with a separate star in the small dark region at the bottom right of the center. This revelation explains the previously observed velocity asymmetries and transforms the understanding of the object from a single to a double-star system, with each star producing its own dramatic outflow.

Astronomers have also identified other outflows in the image, including one originating from the protostar in the top right of the center along with its illuminated cavity walls. HH 797's proximity to HH 211, approximately 30 arcseconds to the south, adds another layer of complexity to the cosmic narrative. HH 211 had been the focus of a previous Webb image released in September 2023.

This stunning new image from the JWST not only unveils the intricate details of HH 797 but also challenges previous assumptions. It enables astronomers to develop a better understanding of the complex dynamics of star formation in our universe and ultimately, how our solar system came to be. 

Also check out the best cameras for astrophotography - some of which are specifically designed for shooting the night sky

The best telescope deals are finally LIVE thanks to the Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale, which runs from October 8-9 2024, so look no further in your search for a fantastic deal on your dream telescope!

So if you want to upgrade to one of the best mirrorless cameras, invest in a brand new camera phone or you're looking for a shiny new telephoto lens, we are rounding up the best camera deals to help you save some hard-earned cash in our main Best camera deals on Amazon Prime Big Deal Days hub.

However, suppose telescopes are your main priority and you're looking for a great deal to take your stargazing to the next level. In that case, our experts are constantly searching the internet for the best savings possible. While this is an Amazon Prime special event, many of the other big retailers will also offer great discounts during the sale period – and some will release daily deals, so check back here regularly to bag the best prices!

US: Best Prime Day Telescope deals

UK: Best Prime Day Telescope deals

Free Amazon Prime trials

Top retailers

Prime Day is an Amazon-only affair, unlike Black Friday, other retailers are also likely to reduce prices over the Amazon Prime Dig Deal Days event - and some may have discounts on products not stocked or not discounted at Amazon. Key retailers to check out for deals and photo-related discounts are:

US Top Retailers:

Amazon: Cheap prices on camera gear
Adorama: Big discounts on cameras and tech
Apple: Save on your old iPhone or iPad
Walmart: DSLR, Mirrorless & action cameras
B&H Photo Video: Deals on camera brands
Best Buy: Save on TVs, laptops, appliances
Canon USA: Buy direct to save money
Dell:  Discounts on laptops and PCs
GoPro: Early deals on Hero 13 Black

UK Top Retailers:

Amazon: We expect big savings on camera, lenses, memory cards and more
Jessops: Deals from the iconic camera store
John Lewis: The latest deals on electrical equipment
Park Cameras: Amazing Cashback savings on cameras & lenses
Wex Photo Video: Great deals on Canon, Rotolight, Elinchrom & more

How to access Amazon Prime Big Deal Days Sale

Unlike Amazon Prime Day, which usually has a few deals available for non-members to shop, Big Deal Days will be a Prime-member exclusive sale. So if you want to take advantage of these pre-Black Friday deals you must be logged into or set up an Amazon Prime account in order to see and shop all the deals. 

Another awe-inspiring magical image of deep space has been captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Released on August 29, the latest high-resolution photo shows us a glimpse of a spiral galaxy that is found 27 million light years away from Earth in the Canes Venatici constellation.

Known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, or Messier 51a, it has been a central focal point for astronomers and astrophotographers for years (it was first discovered in 1773) but has never before has it been viewed in such fine detail. 

The most recent image shows a red whirlpool galaxy with protruding spirals and a bright bluish-white core. While you might not be able to get such a high resolution even with the best cameras for astrophotography, this bedazzling galaxy is sometimes visible from Earth.

• Check out the best telescopes for astrophotography so you can capture stunning photos of the night sky from your back garden

Taken using the JWST main near-infrared camera (NIRcam) and a mid-infrared instrument (MIRI), the two separate photos have been combined into a composite to create a truly out-of-this-world galactic portrait. These incredibly advanced camera systems capture the infrared light that the eye cannot see and decode the data to create images scientists can study to unlock the secrets of our universe. It’s thought that the shape of M51 is due to its close proximity to the nearby dwarf galaxy NGC 5195 and its spiraling arms are formed through its strong gravitational influence. 

Up until now, the clearest image we had of the M51 galaxy was taken by the Hubble Telescope in 2011 but it was nowhere near as in-depth and detailed as the JWST offering. The actual image has been colorized so we can distinguish areas of ionized gas created by recently formed star clusters (the orange and yellow buts) while the darker areas represent empty cavities necessary for the galaxy to maintain its spiral shape. 

This latest image is part of a body of research known as Feedback in Emerteging Extragalactic Star Clusters or for east, FEAST. Since the James Webb telescope is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Telescope, it enables scientists and astronomers to discover even more about deep space. The European Space Agency commented, “Webb is opening a new window into the early stages of star formation and stellar light as well as the energy of reprocessing gas and dust”.

Not only do these images enable us to develop a deeper understanding, but they are signs that the instruments onboard the JWST are still fully functional following some concern there have been some technical issues. While the NIRcam image and the MIRI image offer two different perspectives of the same galaxy, the combined composite offers exaggerates the remarkable wonders of this “grand spiral staircase sweeping through space” - a term that NASA has used to describe it. 

Also check out the best telescopes for kids or the best telescopes for beginners

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has blessed us with yet another awe-inspiring image from space, capturing the vibrant Ring Nebula – which can be seen throughout August.

Also known as Messier 57, the eye-shaped nebula is found in the Lyra constellation 2,283 light years from Earth. The stunning purple and green photograph, taken by the NASA telescope, offers an extremely detailed look at the colorful glowing gas that gives the Ring Nebula its form. Made up of remnants of dying stars, it has been the center of amazement for night-sky enthusiasts since it was discovered in 1779 by the French astronomer, Augustin Darquier.

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These latest images, analyzed by a team of astronomers led by Professor Mike Barlow of University College London and Dr Nick Cox of ACRI in France, offer more than just a breathtaking glimpse into the intricate design of this celestial wonder. For the first time ever, scientists have been able to develop a better understanding of how this cosmic phenomenon came to be, and view individual elements that make up this mesmerizing nebula.

Although confusingly named a planetary nebula, it has nothing to do with planets. When stars die they go through several stages before becoming a white dwarf and, in their final stages, beautiful gaseous clumps emit light in a specific color, depending on its chemical composition – much like a firework.

As stunning as these photos are, they also give us a glimpse into the future of our sun – which will undergo the same fate in around five billion years time. All stars will eventually run out of hydrogen gas and die, causing them to expel a mass of gas and dust into space, but the size and density of a star dictate how monumental the occurrence will be.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has provided us with an extraordinary view of the Ring Nebula that we've never seen before," explains Dr Nick Cox.

"These images hold more than just aesthetic appeal; they provide a wealth of scientific insights into the processes of stellar evolution. By studying the Ring Nebula with JWST, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of the life cycles of stars and the elements they release into the cosmos." 

Since the telescope was sent into orbit in December 2021, it has continued to provide us with images that unlock secrets of the universe. From glowing nebulae to distant galaxies and comets formed with trails of water vapor, its advanced image-capturing devices have been paramount in developing a better understanding of the cosmos and what its future may hold. 

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just completed its first year of operations and already has provided remarkable, never-before-seen insights into our vast and beautiful universe. To commemorate this milestone, NASA has released an image captured by the JWST of a star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, roughly 360 light years away. 

In just one year, the JWST has revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos, peering through dust clouds and capturing light from distant corners of the universe. The first five images revealed by NASA and President Biden captured the deepest and sharpest infrared photos ever seen. From a glittering landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” in the Carina Nebula to an enormous 150 million pixel image of five galaxies known as Stephen’s Quintet. 

• Check out the best telescopes for astrophotography so you can capture the cosmos close up 

Thanks to the advanced high-resolution, high-sensitivity equipment, scientists are developing a much greater understanding of our solar system through studying distant galaxies, how stars formed, and dark matter. There have been some utterly perplexing discoveries too – like how an asteroid belt comet has water vapor and no carbon monoxide; the images it has produced are as stunning as they are informative. 

The latest image captured shows around 50 young stars, all similar in mass to the sun or smaller. While the darker areas are the densest, containing thick dust cocoons of still-forming stars, it also depicts jets bursting from young stars surrounded by interstellar gas and red areas of molecular hydrogen. 

Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland said “Webb’s image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar lifecycle with new clarity. Our own Sun experienced a phase like this, long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another’s star’s story.”

As the James Webb Space Telescope continues into the second year of its mission, the scientific community eagerly anticipates the wealth of discoveries and breakthroughs that lie ahead, further unraveling the mysteries of our vast universe. Slowly but surely we are on our way to unlocking the big question, how did the universe come to be? Oh, and it just so happens we get some absolutely jaw-dropping photos to enjoy too!

Why not also check out the best cameras for astrophotography including the Canon EOS Ra - a full-frame purpose designed camera for shooting space.

Save a celestial chunk on one of Celestron's most coveted telescopes for amateur stargazers with this Amazon Prime Day 2023 deal . The Celestron NexStar 8SE Computerized Telescope – clad in its famous orange finery – is a computer-controlled telescope that will delight seasoned amateur astronomers and beginners alike. And now you can save a tidy £225, since the Celestron NexStar 8SE Computerized Telescope is now just £1274.15. And if you are looking for something less expensive for space exploration, there are some other fantastic Celestron discounts too, over the 48-hour Amazon sale…

If you're looking for a step up from the Celestron NexStar 6SE then the Celestron NexStar 8SE Computerized Telescope is one of the best Prime Day telescope deals. This extremely popular telescope boasts an 8-inch aperture to gather ample light and allows users to get up close to a variety of celestial objects including various planets and deep-sky objects to boot.  

NexStar's GoTo system can pinpoint and track celestial objects thanks to its huge database, allowing even inexperienced astronomers to navigate the night sky with ease. If you're happy to invest in stargazing equipment that will stand the test of time, check out the NexStar 8SE Computerized Telescope, today!

Other Prime Day Celestron deals…

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The maker of both the Stellina and Vespera – two of the best smart telescopes available – will this week launch on Kickstarter a completely different kind of product that partly uses a smartphone to image the night sky.

Starting at just US$149/£117, not including a tripod, Hestia is essentially a separate optical system that uses a smartphone only to align to objects in the sky. The optical system consists of a 30 mm /1.18-inch lens and prisms to collect and focus light, offering up to 25x optical magnification and a field of view of 1.8º.

The way it works is designed to be very simple. The user must download the Gravity by Vaonis app and then position their smartphone on the device to magnetically align the smartphone’s camera with Hestia’s eyepiece. It’s reminiscent of how Celestron’s StarSense telescopes are aligned but with an added imaging capability. 

Any size of a smartphone will work, but the Hestia is not designed to be used to photograph deep-sky objects, something the Stellina and Vespera are. Instead, Vaonis says that Hestia will be able to photograph the moon, the sun (using a solar filter, which will be available separately), and bright objects such as the Orion Nebula (M42) and the Pleiades open cluster. Images will be available within the Gravity app. 

“To reduce costs and offer a telescope that is truly accessible to all, we have relied on the most powerful and widely adopted technology – your smartphone,” said Cyril Dupuy, founder of Vaonis. 

Measuring 17 x 24 x 5.5 cm / 6.7 x 9.5 x 2.2 inches, Hestia is about the size of a book and weighs 500g /1.1 lbs. With a 1/4-inch tripod thread, it’s designed to be used with a tripod with a pan and tilt fluid head. Optional accessories will include a tripod, solar filter, hard case, finderscope, and a motorized mount. 

The Hestia launched on Kickstarter on July 18, 2023, France-based Vaonis said that the new Hestia smart telescope is expected to be available by the end of the year. In just two days, the crowd-funding campaign had raised over $650,000 in pledges and orders

That’s going to be too late for the annular solar eclipse visible in North, Central and South America on October 14, 2023, but it’s well in time for the arguably much more important total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024 visible from North America. The latter event is both mentioned and among the key visuals released by Vaonis. 

“On 8 April 2024, the eagerly anticipated total solar eclipse will cross the United States from coast to coast,” said a press release from Vaonis. “Hestia will be the ideal instrument for a closer and safe look at the eclipse, immortalizing the rarest and most fascinating celestial phenomenon humanity has ever witnessed.” 

About six or seven total solar eclipses occur on Earth every decade. Although a solar filter will be necessary for most solar viewing and for partial stages of solar eclipses, the short totality phase must be imaged without a solar filter in place. 

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Smart telescope company Unistellar has unveiled new technology to fight light pollution as well as a new solar filter for observing the sun. 

Available now as a firmware update for all Unistellar products – the eVscope, eVscope 2, eQuinox and eQuinox 2 – the new Deep Dark Technology is an attempt to automatically eliminate interference caused by city lights even in very bright urban areas to create black backgrounds to celestial objects.  A recent international study revealed that sky brightness is increasing in the US and Europe by an average of 10% per year, making observing faint objects such as nebulae and galaxies much more difficult using optical telescopes.

Read: Unistellar eQuinox 2 smart telescope review

The smart telescopes produced by Unistellar – some of which use electronic eyepieces made by Nikon, which is also an investor – are not optical, instead using camera sensors that take long exposure images and stack them in real-time to reduce noise and improve clarity.

The new algorithms – which automatically download in the Unistellar app and automatically update the firmware in the products – are a direct response to the large number of images of the night sky captured by users of Unistellar telescopes. “Light pollution is not flat – it has variations – and while our former treatment could roughly identify a variation, it was a standardized simple shape,” said Laurent Marfisi, co-founder and CEO of Unistellar, told Digital Camera World in an interview. “Now we have a smarter algorithm that is able to accurately map the variation of luminosity in images – and remove it more accurately.”

Promising deep darks and plenty more dynamic range for the signal from faint celestial objects, the new technology also enables the telescopes to be used sooner after sunset. “Twilight is similar to light pollution, but it depends on the twilight you're talking about,” said Marfisi. “We recommend users can observe in nautical twilight – they don’t have to wait for astronomical darkness.”

For the complete opposite – observing the sun – Unistellar has also announced a custom-made solar filter that transmits only 1/100,000th of the sun’s light. Selling for $249/£219, it’s guaranteed delivery in September. That’s crucial because on October 14, 2023, a ‘ring of fire’ annular solar eclipse will be visible across the southwest US, with the rest of North America experiencing a big partial solar eclipse. 

Solar eclipses are not something Unistellar telescopes have been able to observe before, though Unistellar’s real smart telescope company Vaonis does enable the feature on its Vespera Observation Station. 

“We call it a Smart Solar Filter because it’s a hybrid of software and hardware,” said Marfisi. “The hardware is not revolutionary – it’s just a normal solar filter – but we developed it together with software that allows people to easily and safely point at the sun automatically.” Since images show up only in an electric eyepiece and in the Unistellar app for smartphones and tablets it’s a totally safe way of being solar eclipses. 

At night the telescopes align automatically to the stars using plate-solving technology, so Unistellar had to develop a new orientation technology. “It uses brightness gradients in the sky to find the brightest spot – you just point the telescope, with the filter on, roughly where the sun is and it will automatically get to the brightest spot in the sky, which is the sun,” said Marfisi. 

The filter also comes in good time for the next total solar eclipse, which will cross Mexico, 14 US states, and southeastern Canada on April 8, 2024 – the last such event across the continent until 2045. 

Now is a good time to study the sun even without a solar eclipse. It’s currently close to solar maximum – a peak in activity that occurs every nine to 14 years – which means a lot of sunspots and solar activity can be seen on its surface. 

Read:
Where to photograph 2023’s ‘ring of fire’ annular solar eclipse in America

Plan now for the 2024 Great North American Solar Eclipse

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The latest science reports and imagery from NASA reveal that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might have stumbled onto something very interesting during a galactic treasure hunt. Solar system scientists took the telescope for a spin in the main asteroid belt, and what they didn't find was as perplexing as what they did. 

According to NASA, the presence of water vapor on the comet known as 238P/Read is usually a cosmic clue into the origins of Earth's ancient water source and how it got there. However, Read seems to be one of the only comets that are missing carbon dioxide, as detected by the NIRCam, which is another mystery in itself. 

• Take a look at the best cameras for astrophotography!

The James Webb Telescope's NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, as well as the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument have been used by solar system scientists in studying the origins of Earth’s abundant water - and detected a mystery in the form of a Rare Main Belt Cometthat contained water vapor! 

Although, rather unusually, carbon dioxide was missing from the spectrum of possible chemical compounds comprising this comet (referred to as Comet 238P/Read) which was discovered in 2005, and is situated within the main asteroid belt. Don't worry, it's safe enough away from our Earth to not be a threat, as its orbit brings it closer to the sun than Jupiter. 

The image below is able to communicate a lot of data to scientists and researchers, but it primarily indicates that water ice from the primordial (early) solar system is able to be preserved in that specific region within the asteroid belt. 

As for the lack of carbon dioxide, NASA says there are two plausible explanations. Firstly, Comet Read may have had carbon dioxide when it originally formed, but has since lost it because of warmer temperatures from being in the asteroid belt for an extended time. 

Secondly, scientists propose that Comet Read may have formed in an especially warm area of the solar system, where there would be no carbon dioxide available due to the fact that it vaporizes much more easily than water ice does. 

So why is this such a big deal? it's just a comet, right?

"Understanding the history of water distribution in the solar system will help us to understand other planetary systems, and if they could be on their way to hosting an Earth-like planet,” shares Stefanie Milam, Webb deputy project scientist for planetary science.

"Our water-soaked world, teeming with life and unique in the universe as far as we know, is something of a mystery – we’re not sure how all this water got here," she explains.  

In other NASA news, JWST also found another unusual trace of water vapor last month on a rocky exoplanet known as GJ 486 b. This planet is said to be 30% larger than our Earth and three times as massive, plus, it's also pretty closely orbited around its red dwarf star, meaning that it's very much inhabitable given the surface temperature of around 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius). 

Webb's observations from the NIRSpec instrument show traces of water vapor on this scorching hot exoplanet, so how is this possible? Astronomers believe that the rocky planet would have likely had its atmosphere depleted by x-ray radiation and ultraviolet rays that have been emitted from the red dwarf star of which the planet snuggly orbits. 

However, the small presence of water vapor suggests that the rocky exoplanet might still have an atmosphere if the water is associated with it. Although, it's also unclear if the water vapor could actually be on the star itself in what's referred to as cool starspots, and not actually from the planet at all.

“Water vapor in an atmosphere on a hot rocky planet would represent a major breakthrough for exoplanet science. But we must be careful and make sure that the star is not the culprit,” shares principal investigator Kevin Stevenson from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. 

For more updates on what's happening in the universe, and if you want to keep up with the latest image releases, head over to the James Webb Space Telescope gallery, where you can see all of Webb's first images and learn more about what they depict. NASA will be launching new images at least every other week.

• You might also be interested in the best lenses for astrophotography, as well as the best astrophotography software, and not forgetting the best CCD cameras for astrophotography and the best light pollution filters for night photography.

Many photographers love to image the night sky and taking long exposures on a wide-angle lens is an affordable way to do so. However, deep sky photography is a real treat but it’s relatively complex when dealing with star trackers and camera adapters. That’s where the Unistellar eQuinox 2 comes in. The second in the eQuinox series this smart telescope navigates to and zooms into the most distant galaxies and nebulae for impressive views. Not only that, but the telescope also photographs the views for you. In its database, there are over 5000 celestial objects and over 37 million stars which it can automatically slew to.

A simple set-up that will be familiar to any photographer with a tripod, it’s quick to get started and there’s almost no prerequisite knowledge of the night sky needed (except to use the telescope when it’s dark and cloudless). An improved 6.2MP image sensor gives decent images of the stars and if you pack it away in the proprietary backpack it’s handily convenient to travel to locations with.

Specifications

Image resolution: 6.2 MP
Focal length: 450 mm
Storage: 64 GB
Field of view: 34 x 47 arc minutes
Mount: Motorized Alt-azimuth
Limiting magnitude: 18.2
Battery: 11 hrs
Mirror diameter: 114 mm
Weight: 9 kg

Key Features

Everything about the eQuinox 2 is designed to be simple. The telescope has a single power button that flashes purple and is a constant red when attempting to connect and connected to a smart device respectively. The telescope tube is mounted on a single fork arm which is also motorized and slots into the tripod with ease, secured with two screws.

The tripod is height adjustable with three leg sections and two locking levels and the legs can be widened by sliding out the adjustment tab at the top of the tripod legs for a total of two positions. The lens cap also doubles as a Bahtinov mask for which to focus the telescope which is useful when attempting deep sky imaging which is notoriously difficult to get pin-sharp due to the lack of light from small, dim stars.

The real magic happens in the interface between the telescope and the smart device. Install and open the Unistellar app on Android or iOS devices and you’ll be met with a user-friendly interface that has three main sub-menus: Catalog, Scientific Observations, and the Gallery. The Catalog outlines every possible night sky object on its database, which can be searched using the search function or filtered through by type and whether it is currently visible in your location and time. A big part of Unistellar’s push is in its astronomy community, under the Scientific Observations tab you can sign-up and take part in citizen science projects and help with asteroid occultations, exoplanet transits, planetary defense tracking, or cometary activity.

The telescope can be manually controlled by pressing the purple telescope icon and selecting ‘move’ which is helpful to look at specific objects in the sky when the telescope isn’t oriented (sadly it only orientates correctly when it’s properly dark) and has a slow mode for accurate slewing. When oriented though, use the Catalog to ‘go to’ specific night sky objects without having to know anything about where they are in the night sky. 

Build & Handling

It’s hard to tell the eQuinox 2 apart from the original and it’s also very similar in style to the eVscope 2, its more sophisticated sibling. But no matter how similar it looks to the other Unistellar smart telescopes it’s absolutely beautiful. A long, slender 450mm reflector it’s flanked in black plastic and a meteor grey metal finish. 

Although quite long at 68cm base to lens cap and it weighs 9kg it’s easily portable with the additional backpack, we’d recommend this if you’re wanting to take it further than the garden as it confidently protects the delicate instrument and tripod. Though we’d avoid walking long distances because the backpack is long and with all the kit loaded up it’s quite wearing on the shoulders.

The tripod is absolutely rock solid and thanks to several aforementioned height and leg adjustments it’s flexible enough to be used pretty much anywhere. We didn’t feel that at any point the telescope was at risk of toppling over. 

The Unistellar app is brilliantly designed and connects to the telescope without issue, provided it’s dark enough for the telescope to self-orientate. Slewing is quick and simple as the app displays a virtual joystick to change positions. Overall, both the telescope and the app feel solid, robust and are nice to look at and use.

Performance

The performance of the eQuinox 2 is impressive. Building on everything the original eQuinox did well it kicks things up a gear with a higher resolution of 6.2MP to provide more detailed imagery of the night sky. There was a little waiting around for a completely dark sky when we tested it because it automatically aligns itself based on the night sky visible and, when setting up at twilight, it was still a little too bright for the sensor despite our being able to see the moon, Jupiter and some of the brighter stars.

A quick go to on the app sent us whirling across the night sky to view galaxies, nebulae and star clusters. It took about five to ten minutes to get going from synchronising it with our Android smartphone and then we could let it do its thing. So much so that, provided we retained Wi-Fi communication with the telescope (the phone attaches to the broadcasted Wi-Fi signal from the eQuinox 2) we could go back inside and operate it in the garden from the warmth of the kitchen, or car when on location. 

This kind of speedy setup and wireless operation is ideal for anyone who wants to view and photograph the night sky but doesn’t have the time or patience to spend a long time aligning the telescope and setting up a mirrorless camera on the eyepiece with an adapter and continued the convoluted process of imaging the night sky with dark and light frames etc. We managed to photograph the Whirlpool galaxy, Sunflower galaxy, the moon and some star clusters without issue. The enhanced view mode gives even more detailed views as it takes multiple long exposures and stacks them, without any camera settings or editing requirements from the user.

Verdict

Smart telescopes aren’t cheap, but the eQuinox 2 is much more reasonably priced than the eVscope 2 so it’s a good way in if you’re an astronomer that has a little cash to invest in a decent telescope but also wants to photograph the night sky. It’s especially good for rank amateurs who want to learn about and see the night sky but have little to no knowledge of constellations or where to find deep-sky objects. However, it’s also equally helpful for more advanced astronomers who simply don’t have the time to go through a lengthy setup process as with traditional telescopes, adding adapters on for cameras and experimenting with accessories to make the most of the optical instrument.

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Unistellar isn’t the only company to manufacture smart telescopes. The other big hitter is Vaonis and their latest effort is the Vespera. Smaller and lighter than the eQuinox, the Vaonis Vespera is seemingly the world's lightest smart telescope at under 11lbs. It’s still an investment so beginner astronomers may need to take this into account at first, but it works in much the same way as the eQuinox 2 by automatically slewing to celestial objects and imaging them using its Sony IMX462 image sensor that can photograph up to 8MP stills.

Those that want a more traditional way to stargaze will likely want something like the Celestron NexStar 5SE which is a neat little catadioptric telescope that combines the benefits of both reflector and refractor into a tiny telescope that’s still eminently useful. You can upgrade the eyepieces, finderscope, tripod and other parts unlike the smart telescopes which come bundled as-is and it too has a motorized, computerized single fork arm mount that can ‘go to’ celestial objects, once aligned.

For beginners though, you may want to take a look at a cheaper refractor like the Celestron Inspire 100AZ. Long and slim, it’s lightweight and ultra-portable so you can take it further than the back garden for skywatching. It’s inexpensive too, which makes it ideal for beginners and those on a tight budget.

Read More: Find out more about astronomy and astrophotography with our guides to the best smart telescopes, the best computerized telescopes, and the best budget telescopes.

Nikon's telescope credentials are well established, but the company yesterday announced its first investment in smart telescopes. It is not, however, a completely strange new world; Nikon is backing Unistellar, a French company with whom it has already worked.

Smart telescopes are seen as a disruptive technology in the amateur astronomy market, with smartphone control helping people find the subjects and keep them in frame. Nikon had already prodived a micro OLED eyepiece for the Unistellar eVscope 2, after a previously announced partnership. Now it seems Nikon is investing in what might be the future of its telescope business.

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Unistellar's description of the Nikon technology is fullsome in its praise. It describes "a sophisticated array of lenses, sourced from Nikon's expert optical labs." And that's just for the eVscope 2. The next step, according to the Unistellar announcement, is to become the world leader in consumer astronomy.

"Nikon ambitions to contribute to the advancement of science by bringing the excitement of astronomical observation to all" is the word from Yasuhiro Ohmura, Senior Vice President of Nikon. 

We hope we can blame the translation for the verb use there, but the point is strong. Unistellar smart telescopes have been used in spotting exoplanets and near-earth asteroids, and users can collaborate through organizations like NASA and SETI.

Indeed, Unistellar's existing collaboration software is used by an online community of 10,000 observers. Live captures can be shared and, who knows, perhaps this is how extra-terrestrial life will first be seen?

As Unistellar's announcement makes plain, the investment-backed partnership will make the company more nimble in the market. It already has a presence in the US, Europe, Japan, and 60 countries, but is keen to grow. It also notes that smart tech makes it easier for urban astronomers to find their targets, despite noise pollution.

While the announcement is exciting, you can start using Unistellar's tech now; as well as the eVscope 2 we mentioned, there is also the Unistellar eQuinox 2 that uses phone screens.

If this article was of interest you might want to check our list of best computerized telescopes, or our best beginner telescope guide. If you feel you'd like to start more traditionally – and at a bit less cost – then check our best budget telescopes. Let's not forget the photographic, either; we also keep an eye on the best telescopes for astrophotography.

How well do you know the night sky? The Celestron NexStar 6SE assumes you know nothing, but are capable of finding and pointing the telescope at any three bright stars. If you can do that then this computerized GoTo telescope’s SkyAlign tech automatically aligns itself. It’s clever stuff – and it’s certainly why the Celeston NexStar range feature as some of the best computerized telescopes. 

However, the Celestron NexStar 6SE isn’t aimed at beginners, the high price makes sure of that, though there are few GoTo telescopes this easy to use this side being a fully fledged smart telescope. 

Resplendent in its iconic orange livery, the Celestron NexStar 6SE’s diminutive optical tube is down to its Schmidt-Cassegrain optical system, one of the most popular designs for amateur astronomers. 

But is the Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope a worthy purchase for keen stargazers? Here’s everything you need to know about why to buy – and why not to buy – the Celestron NexStar 6SE.

Specifications

Optical design: Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector  
Aperture: 5.9”/150mm
Focal length: 59”/1500mm
Focal ratio: f/10
Eyepiece focal length: 1”/25 mm (60x)
Total kit weight: 21 lbs/9.5 kg
Mount type: motorized altazimuth

Key Features

The Celestron NexStar 6SE is a Schmidt–Cassegrain catadioptric telescope of the kind that’s been popular with amateur astronomers for decades. It sits on a single fork arm motorized mount that doubles as the brains behind a computerized GoTo system. If you have little knowledge of the night sky then this is gold dust. 

You select an object from a database on this telescope’s hard-wired NexStar+ hand controller and the Celestron NexStar 6SE slews right to it. Its database has 40,000 objects and you can also go off-catalog and manually enter celestial coordinates if you want to study, say, a passing comet. 

The Celestron NexStar 6SE has a 6-inch aperture and comes with a single 25mm eyepiece. The inclusion of only one optic is a shame, as the telescope's focal length makes high magnifications – as high as 350x – possible and usable if you add your own higher-power eyepieces. The eyepieces sit in a star diagonal at the back of the optical tube, which makes it easier to look at objects without having to be directly behind the telescope. 

While the Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope is not designed to be one of the best telescopes for astrophotography, it is possible to attach a camera to the back of the Celestron NexStar 6SE using a T-adaptor. Images of the lunar surface are the most likely target. 

Build & Handling

The Celestron NexStar 6SE’s fork mount is a simple altazimuth design – as most motorized GoTo telescopes are – so there’s no need to get involved in complicated polar alignments and balancing using counterweights, as is necessary on equatorial mounts. 

Although its aluminum optical tube is lightweight, the Celestron NexStar 6SE is not the easiest telescope you’ll ever maneuver from your house to your backyard. Most of the blame goes to its tripod, which has a very large footprint when set up, though it keeps the Celestron NexStar 6SE stable. Being completely level on a hard surface is equally as important if the Celestron NexStar 6SE’s GoTo system is to work accurately. 

The best advice is to set it up while it’s still light because as well as having to use a spirit level (a small and highly losable one is provided in the box) it’s also necessary to align the Star Pointer red dot finderscope. Once that’s done the StarAlign system works well, though you can prevent time-consuming failures by choosing bright stars that are as far from each other as possible. It takes slightly longer to manually slew between to and fro, but it’s worth it. 

Performance

The Celestron NexStar 6SE is an excellent telescope for observing virtually anything in the night sky. Once you’ve leveled it, aligned it, focused it, and got to know its GoTo system the Celestron NexStar 6SE delivers hit after hit. 

Our first target was Mars, its red hue immediately obvious, with other solar system targets even more impressive. Jupiter’s moons were presented clearly around the giant planet’s bright, happily, optically precise disk. There was no hint of any color fringing around this bright object. Ditto a First Quarter Moon, on which we observed the light and shadow close to the sunset/sunrise line. We could clearly see the magnificent Apennine Mountains, using high-power eyepieces to survey Mare Imbrium and the Archimedes crater in impressive detail. 

We also went off-catalog and went searching the heavens for comet C/2022 E3 as it passed its closest to Earth. Googling then manually entering the RA (right ascension) and Dec (declination) – coordinates on the sky that correspond to longitude and latitude on Earth – was a bit of a pain, but the Celestron NexStar 6SE produced a decent view of this faint and diffuse object. 

However, what really delighted us were tack-sharp views of the reflected starlight on the Orion Nebula’s interstellar cloud. Optically, the Celestron NexStar 6SE is hugely impressive – but you will need to buy some good quality eyepieces to get the best from it. 

Verdict

Sharp, precise, and with impressive StarBright XLT optical coatings that avoid any optical nasties, the Celestron NexStar 6SE is a telescope to save up for and use for many years.

However, it’s not without its foibles and there are some reasons to think that the Celestron NexStar 6SE and its GoTo ilk will soon be in line for a tech refresh because the concept of a wired hand controller is quickly becoming outdated.  

You can find out more about our astronomy coverage at Digital Camera World, with our guides to the sky this month, or get inspired with the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Astrophotography is a time-consuming business, with the need to track objects in the night sky – be they stars, nebulae or galaxies – while taking exposures making it complex, fiddly and not as fun as it should be. The best star trackers help, but many are basic, buggy devices with as many cons as pros. 

Cue the Benro Polaris smart electric tripod head ($899/£900), which offers camera interface control (if you wire up your camera to it via a mess of cables in the box) and pre-programming. It allows users to set up a camera on a tripod – with the Polaris in between – and tweak the ISO, aperture, shutter speed (and much more) from a smartphone. 

The basic two-axis version of the Benro Polaris spits out a WiFi network and can also be operated remotely if you insert a SIM card. That’s a unique proposition in itself and it’s largely for creating time-lapses, motion time-lapses. HDR, focus stacking, panoramas, and sunset/sunrise tracking. 

What we’re reviewing here is the Benro Polaris Astro Edition ($1,149/£1,100), which adds an angled azimuth module that attaches to the main device’s quick-release clamp, making it a three-axis head to enable star tracking. It’s also available as a slightly more affordable version that lacks cellular connectivity. Both versions make images of the night sky possible, from automated stacks of short exposures to Milky Way panoramas.

Here’s how we got on with the first intelligent electric remote head for astrophotography.

Specifications

Max. lens focal length: 300mm

Control: Benro Polaris app

Max. payload: 15lbs/7kg

Alignment method: smartphone compass and one-star alignment via Polaris app

Power: built-in 2,500 mAh battery (or USB-C portable battery)

Tripod thread: 3/8-inch (and 1/4 inch adaptor screw) 

Weight: 1.98 kg (1.46kg Polaris Body Head + 525g Astro module)  

Dimensions: 160x139x125mm

Website: www.benro.com/en/product/benro-polaris.html

Key features

Most star trackers are fiddly devices with lots of small parts. They demand care and patience. Not so the Benro Polaris, which is sculpted from aluminum alloy. It requires a very sturdy, but with that in place, it can happily support a whopping 7kg of gear. That’s great news for anything approaching deep-sky astrophotography, which demands decently long, heavy lenses, though it tops out t 400mm. In practice, it’s a little less than that. The hardware’s IPX6 waterproofing is important, too, because dew can be an issue when on night shoots. 

The main unit comes has a micro SD card slot for recording images – not something we’ve seen before on a head or star tracker – as well as motorized knobs and levers for making positional adjustments (something that can also be done using the landscape-orientated Polaris app). 

With Benro Polaris wired up to a camera via its USB-C slot (it’s compatible with these cameras) and a smartphone tuned to its own WiFi network (though a cellular option is also available for those that want to be further away … say, sat in a warm car!), the Polaris app gives you complete in-app control of your camera. After it’s taken the image – with whatever parameters you chose – it presents a small image on your smartphone (though it can’t easily be post-processed or shared online), which it saves to that microSD card. 

It’s possible to use the Benro Polaris while sitting inside, but that’s severely limited by its tight WiFi network. The SIM card option is interesting, but the system would work better for those doing astrophotography in their backyard if it was able to be found and accessed on a home’s WiFi network.

Performance, quality and usability

Alignment is easy, but imperfect. It’s initially delightful, with the first half of the process needing only the compass in a smartphone to be placed alongside the mount for the Benro Polaris to figure out roughly where it is and what it’s pointing at. Then it’s necessary to do a one-star alignment. You need to pick a star from the app’s grid-style list, which the Benro Polaris will then attempt to line up with. It then presents a bullseye in the middle of the screen, with some digital joystick skills required to nudge the star into the center. There are 5x and 16x magnification options, but getting it perfectly aligned is tricky. In a basic sense, it’s not a problem because the Benro Polaris will slew automatically – and quite quickly – to any object in its (rather limited) database of stars and constellations (though Messier objects are in there, too, if you know to search for them). It puts the chosen object in the center of the field of view for photography to begin. 

However, as well as requiring the user to be able to align it with one star, it’s surely not the most accurate way of aligning. Sure, your smartphone tells the app where it is on the planet and the initial compass alignment gives it the cardinal directions, but what the Benro Polaris really needs is intelligent plate-solving as featured on the some telescopes, such as the Celestron StarSense Explorer 8-inch Dobsonian, and the best smart telescopes. It’s something of an oversight at this price. However, it’s still a huge advance from the manual polar scopes most star trackers use. 

It’s also fair to say that the app lacks polish. It has plenty of features, but it’s not a patch on the best stargazing apps. It should be. It needs to be. After all, it’s literally the user’s only navigational and photography aid. It even comes with AR, but what you see can’t be zoomed in on, is difficult to search within, and generally seems second-rate compared to the excellent hardware provided. 

One of the Benro Polaris’ most significant boasts is its accuracy. It promises control precision of up to 0.01˚ (36 arc seconds), meaning that longer exposures can be used without stars beginning to trail. We took several long exposures during our tests – from 30 seconds to three minutes – with several lenses. The Benro Polaris works best with relatively short exposures, particularly with anything over 200mm. However, it finds targets accurately and tracks them proficiently. You could easily take hundreds of 30-second exposures of deep-sky objects to stack – albeit within a wide field of view – and it’s more than accurate enough to use for wide-field night sky panoramas. Up to 60-second exposures are possible without trailing, but not much beyond. 

However, whenever we went off-catalog and slewed to re-frame a shot (for example, to get a balanced composition of the Pleiades and nearby Mars) the resulting image was marked with weird lines. This happened repeatedly. Other slight annoyances include ineffective automatic focusing at night and an inability, thanks to its physical construction, to image anything at the zenith (its tilt is limited to 80º). That’s something of a faux pas given that astronomical objects are literally at their best for astrophotography when they appear immediately above the viewer at 90º (called culmination). The Benro Polaris is unique and impressive as a star tracker, but it’s certainly not the finished article. 

Sample images

Verdict

The Benro Polaris Astro Edition is easily one of the best star tracker camera mounts for astrophotography available, but it’s also by far the most expensive. Its build quality is unrivaled among star trackers, but in use, it has its fair share of quirks. 

Using a smartphone to align to the stars is groundbreaking – and something we hope catches on with other star-tracker brands – but its one-star alignment seems a little basic. We wonder if two or three-star alignment (which most computerized telescopes use) or plate-solving tech to automatically align (as featured on smart telescopes) would allow even longer tracked images. 

Let’s hope the app keeps developing because the Benro Polaris has the potential to be a truly autonomous and easy-to-use star tracker – but it’s not quite there yet. 

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During its launch year of 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope had us thrilled. Webb has already spotted some of the most distant starlight ever seen, captured stars forming, and brought us insane pictures of the cosmos. 

Webb goes a million miles (literally) beyond what the best telescopes for astrophotography can view, and after just one year in space, NASA has reported that its optics are "performing nearly twice as well as mission requirements".

New images from the telescope are being released all the time, though, and the latest was A Wreath of Star Formation in NGC 7469, which is a gloriously luminous spiral found in the constellation Pegasus. In the image we can see what appears to be a six-pointed star, but this isn't actually a celestial object – rather something known as a diffraction spike produced by bends of light around the telescope.

The image was captured using Webb's Mid-InfraRed Instrument, Near-InfraRed Camera and Near-InfraRed Spectrograph, which NASA explains can be used to disperse light from an object into its different wavelengths.

Scientists are constantly analyzing the secrets of Webb datasets and images, which means we could see the mysteries of this starburst revealed even further in the future.

If you want to see more Webb image releases, head to the James Webb Space Telescope gallery, where you can see all of Webb's first images and learn more about what they depict. NASA will be launching new images regularly.

French smart telescope-maker Unistellar has used CES 2023 to announce and show off its eVscope eQuinox 2 smart telescope – the follow-up to 2021’s impressive eVscope eQuinox. Selling for US$2,499/£2,199, it’s the company’s most affordable model yet in a line-up that also includes the Unistellar eVscope 2. 

Read: Best smart telescope

What sets apart eQuinox 2 from eVscope 2 – and, indeed, from almost every other telescope on sale – is its lack of an eyepiece. A 4.5-inch/114mm reflector telescope with a focal length of 450mm, focal ratio of f/4 and 50x magnification, like its stable-mates the eQuinox 2 is more an autonomous astrophotography rig than a backyard telescope. 

It’s inspired by how professional telescopes on mountaintops work; inside is a Sony CMOS image sensor that uses Unistellar’s ‘Enhanced Vision’ technology’ intelligent image processing, live-stacking long-exposures of deep-sky objects it’s tracking and displaying them on the company’s smartphone/tablet app. Unistellar also tells us that its partnership with NASA will soon permit any eQuinox 2 to be used to search for distant exoplanets around other stars. 

On this new version, the image sensor is upgraded from a Sony IMX224 to a Sony IMX347, which increases the resolution of its images from 4.8 megapixels to 6.2 megapixels, an increase of 27%. The eQuinox 2 also brings a new field of view, offering 34x47 arcminutes compared to the original product’s narrower 27x37 arcminutes. Crucially, that means the Moon now fits into its field of view. Though eQuinox 2 isn’t primed for observing our natural satellite, Unistellar tells us that a future firmware update will bring it into sharp focus. The telescope weighs 9kg with its motorized Alt-Azimuth mount and 11-hour rechargeable battery; it has 64GB of built-in storage.

The eQuinox 2’s images will also benefit from advances in machine learning, not only in terms of contrast and color, but also the removal of the effects of light pollution – perhaps the most impressive benefit of smart telescopes. Here ‘Smart Light Pollution Reduction’ digitally removes skyglow to allow people in heavily urban settings to view deep-sky objects. 

However, perhaps the biggest change is what the eQuinox 2 is designed to observe. Once restricted to long exposure observations of galaxies, nebulae and stars, a new firmware addition to its ‘Enhanced Vision’ technology makes it possible to use eQuinox 2 to study planets – chiefly Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. That will be done using a technique called ‘lucky imaging’ to help overcome Earth’s turbulent atmosphere, which plays havoc with planetary photography. Often used by astrophotographers, ‘lucky imaging’ refers to the practice of taking a succession of short exposures of these bright objects in the hope that there will be a gap in turbulence when the ‘seeing’ is perfect.

“Thanks to its state-of-the-art innovations and its smart design choices, we are making space within reach from anywhere, even from light-polluted cities,” said Laurent Marfisi, co-founder and CEO of Unistellar. “Now, everyone from novice stargazers to amateur astronomers can enjoy stunning clarity, color, and hard-to-see detail like the striking colors of the Dumbbell Nebula.”

Pre-sales for the eQuinox 2 are open with the product available from mid-February 2023.

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