DWARF 2 Smart Telescope - In-depth Review & Results

foreign folks it's Chris welcome back today we want to take a look at the newly published smart telescope from dwarf lab called dwarf 2. it's supposed to be a multi-purpose all-in-one and easy to use Imaging system suitable for multiple Imaging scenarios but most importantly for us and that's the reason why I review it here on this channel dwarf lab claims that with included star trekking Focus outer alignment and imaging stacking dwarf 2 is a smart telescope designed for effortless astrophotography meant especially for beginners so we want to answer the question is dwarf to a valid entry-level astrotography telescope for beginners capable of closing the gap between the night sky and the beginner as they claim on their homepage let's find out one thing to be clear about right away dwarf lab sent me all the hardware for free and asked me to review the product here on my channel for UFOs but I had no editorial influence in this video whatsoever and this was important to me but they also asked me to maybe send them additional thoughts to their product and or maybe some ideas and wishes on how to improve the product from NS photography standpoint so if you have any ideas wishes or comments put them right down in the comment section below I think this is a great possibility to help Forge a cool new asteroid tool and if you are down there I shamelessly ask you to hit that like And subscribe button to further increase the impact of this Channel and get more folks into ass photography it's like always very much appreciated okay so let's start by quickly going over the specifications of dwarf 2. it's a Mobile Imaging system connected to your smartphone app using two camera systems on the front one camera is a telephoto lens and the other is more like wild feel like your smartphone the telephoto has a much bigger aperture of 24 millimeters and a field of view comparable to 600 ish millimeter of regular cameras given the size of dwarf the physical focal length obviously can't be over half a meter long that's because the X focal length is just 100 millimeter folded by a prism to use the entire length of the device a very clever design Choice there but given the tiny sensor the field of view is comparable to say a normal telescope range dwarf2 uses the Sony imx415 starvis sensor and while I'm not a dedicated sensor expert the Sony Stars has positive reviews when it comes to dark Imaging environments so seems like a reasonable Choice there the device is best placed onto a tripod and moves in two directions up down left and right either control through the app or autonomously this Mount type is called alt us mounts and it's together with the equatorial mounts one of the two main telescope Mount systems out there one nice Hardware feature though is the replaceable battery pack the capacity has lasted me for about two to three hours of intense Imaging sessions in the freezing cold of the night okay a movable camera system with two very different cameras what are the use cases of this design first there's the normal daylight photography I will cover this in another video because I want to focus on the Astro side of things in this video but in short you can use the wide angle lens to aim the telephoto lens to capture animals Birds buildings or whatever very zoomed and you can use the Mosaic mode to capture a panorama stitch by dozens of telephoto images to generate a gigapixel panorama more on that later more importantly for us nighttime folks we can use the movable axis to track the movement of the night sky and use the telephoto lens to capture astronomical objects Sun Moon planets star cluster nebula Galaxy and dwarflob claims that this is pretty much without any effort hence smart telescope and that would be truly interesting so it's finally time to unbox the new baby dwarf flop included dwarf 2 itself a nice little tripod A fitting bag the battery pack a magnet filter holder adapter one astrophotography UHC filter for deep Sky objects two solar filters One SD card a smartphone micro telescope gimmick whatever and yeah that's it okay let's fire up the app and dwarf2 and have a quick look at the basic functionalities opening the app will look like this you access four things first the settings weirdly hidden behind a user icon whatever here you can get to camera settings and connecting settings not gonna touch that for now a link to the home page of dwarf lab for tutorials that's neat your album with images taken well right now this section is a little complicated in my opinion dwarf 2 doesn't download the images directly to your smartphone but stores them on the SD card that's nice but instead you can preview them here or download them onto your phone album which you can see here and that might take some time and after that you can export the downloaded files to your camera roll if you feel like just to be clear we won't use that extensively because I'll just grab the SD card and straight on copy all the folders onto my PC anyway and this is pretty neat because all Imaging sessions are sorted in folders so but if you want to show a certain shot to your friend via your smartphone I figure the export option is a valid thing though so and this button connects your phone with dwarf2 there is a necessity for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi being turned on and dwarf 2 uses both of them because well I don't know but after that and after a while it connects and we get to this screen this here is the overall Imaging screen of dwarf 2 that we will spend most of our time in here we have a bunch of different buttons so let's go over them very quickly this here we'll quit the camera this one will open or close the wide angle camera you need to know that those pop-up menus are overlaying you can't control one under the other so make sure to close them after usage to avoid confusion this here opens the camera settings like exposure time gain IR filter brightness Etc tap to open change value tap to close very easy this green button down there is the GamePad like stick for moving dwarf around normally you will use the wide camera to aim and the telephoto lens to take the images it's a bit like you need some moments to get used to it but it works pretty okay this button here is for the focus menu a plus minus menu pops up and you can alter the focus during daylight you can easily double tap the screen and dwarf with autofocus that is somewhat strangely loud and a bit too slow for my taste but overall it works pretty reliantly this is the album we mentioned before this is the capture button and this is the feature icon pretty small but pretty important too because each Imaging mode has different special options hidden behind this button in daylight Imaging mode it's only the object tracking but whatsoever we want to move on to Astro models so let's actually take an image of a deep Sky object first we choose the filter if we want any say the UHC filter for nebula in light polluted areas we can screw them onto those little cute goggles and magnetically clip them in front of dwarfs 2 camera I was always afraid of them falling off but they never did so then we need to focus dwarf lab recommends focusing dwarf during daylight to a very distant object if you missed that step you can set the exposure to one second and gain to 100 and point to a very bright star you can manually turn dwarf around and point it in the beginning of the Imaging session so no worries here I always used Jupiter's moon to focus on them and it worked pretty well but focus is a bit fiddly overall and dwarf lap really needs to improve on this point to build a reliable out of Starker Focus routine here so all you need to do is press one button focus and that's that and let the smart telescope do its thing but we instead after finishing Focus we press the feature button and start setting dwarf 2 up for our Imaging session so let's go if you are in Focus you need to set dwarf into the home position and point the alt axis up to an angle where dwarf has a free line of sight in the night sky in let's say nearly every direction the altitude shouldn't be too high to gain Precision at least that's what I assume given the normal alignment routines I am familiar with but nearly anything will do simply press calibration and then dwarf to will slew left center right and take three images compare the observed Stars against an internal map and since it imaged points on a Circle it can measure its current inclination and the rotation and that's everything it needs to know to match the internal map and the real Sky against each other and this procedure Works fairly fast worst that can happen to use that you need to redo it because dwarf points let's say towards a wall or tree and hence cannot figure out where it is but as the procedure is so fast like only a few seconds or something you can easily redo it after calibration we can crank up the exposure time to 15 seconds but Stars will still Trail I was tricked by that and thinking dwarf 2 didn't do its homework and calibration was flawed but it isn't it's a design flaw if you wish I'll come back to that later but for now we press Auto go to and choose the desired celestrial object dwarf2 should know where it's pointing to but like with tracking it wants to be sure and we'll take another image play it solve it and in other words figuring out where it's currently looking and then slew to the desired Target automatically wait a second and it will re-center and to be fair it's amazingly fast the re-centering didn't always work for me so I had to re-enter the object but in the end it was calibrated and we were centered and we adapt the exposure time and the gain and we are nearly ready to go quick word to the exposure time I would wait a few moments until dwarf 2 established the best tracking possible and then set the exposure to the maximum value without star Trails after that you raise your gain until your background gets new really too bright for your target for me for example the exposure of 15 seconds and the gain of 60 worked very well but that will depend on your location and the light pollution and stuff like that under the icon more is not just any other random stuff no here's the start of our Imaging mode I don't know why they keep hiding important stuffs behind very small menu icons but okay we ensure the number of images remember more is better I took like let's say 200 images per objects and 2x2 binning is mandatory by now and sadly display stack versus current image we choose stacked and format is Tiff fits would be gray but as long as this is raw we can live with it and that's that after Focus calibration Auto go to settings we hit red and wait dwarf2 will now take images according to your settings and we'll stack them together behind the scenes and the Stacked image will appear on screen that is actually video assisted astronomy you watch the image grow and with every single exposure new data is added to the image and the image gets more smooth and you can use those curves to stretch the data the longer you wait the more aggressive you can stretch the data because more data is available what dwarf 2 doesn't offer until now is out of stretch and that is a shame I mean stretching works but again one button pressed out of focus outer stretch there would be a game changer because frankly what does any amateur know about a histogram stretch they want to press a button and that's that but nevertheless we are Imaging Aster targets now there's the number of frames the number stacked and they will rise and rise and Rise until you reach the final number all sub images are saved and we can work with them later no worries and we need to after Imaging you can take asteroid images to get rid of some of the Imaging artifacts but dwarf 2 leads you through this process so I'll skip it for now and yeah that's that that's it we copy all the files from the SD card and yeah this won't be a processing tutorial but I use deep Sky stacker DSS it's free serial it's free this is free for final stacking and post processing and here are the results this is M1 the crap nebula it's a supernova Remnant it's fuzzy no colors but this was only 23 minutes from my bottle 6 sky with UHC filters so not bad for that these are the player DS M45 for something like 90 minutes with the UHC filter from my home bottle 6. you can only see the faint ghost of nebulosit here but anyway the stars are a little bit bloated but that might be just me and my editing skills my bottle six guy by the way is with intense Christmas decoration the neighbors really love their Christmas decoration and they may very well do so this is another Target from my home NGC 896884 the double cluster at something like 120 minutes with the UHC filter from my bottle six and because I really like the results so far from my home I wanted to go further so I packed my stuff and drove into the void of lower Saxony Villages are sparse here finlands and marshlands are plenty it's the southern part of a very big Heath area definitely haunted but the map showed bottled three so I had to go and test dwarf under really dark skies I mean freezing weather Crystal Clear Skies the dark location with Portal 3 a roundish so these should be perfect conditions for draw of and we can really see what it can deliver what the hardware is capable of okay folks we officially entered nowhere Zone I'm in the middle of a forest it's creepy so I'm a bit okay I arrived it's super dark here it's way darker than I expected still a bit creepy because I can't see anything my eyes need to adapt and yeah I'm going to set up all the equipment and we're gonna see what the evening will bring us and seriously I did that just for you folks so smash that like button now I was so afraid I'm making no jokes here I had a pack of wolves howling in the distance but I got my image all right and here it is the famous Orion Nebula m42 only 100 minutes of data without any filters with 15 seconds and gained 60. the core structure is visible the dust Lane surrounding this beautiful star forming region in space and you can see the little companion and next to them the Running Man nebula as well the stars are a little bit bloated I got this dark color slightly pinkish whatever I did in post-processing but I really like that image with the reddish tones inside the nebula and the shadowy groups of dusts here for me this proves dwarf 2 can deliver great extra images and even though I got sick the next day I was able to get two hours of data off the Andromeda galaxy M31 back from my portal 6 home sky that was lazy lazy Aster Imaging my daughter brought the dwarf 2 outside I click connect fiddle through the routine let drove capture the Galaxy and never left the sofa the result is quite impressive the field of view is wide enough to capture the Galaxy entirely as well as the little companion galaxies M32 and M101 the dust lanes are clearly visible and even some star-forming regions as well again the color is a bit weak but this is due to only grabbing a few dozens of minutes with 24 millimeter aperture this is definitely a downside of having a small aperture but overall I really like the images I mean if you show this image to a friend hey look what I captured last night from my sofa I think they will be impressed no questions here okay so what else can you image I mean the moon of course here's our Rocky neighbor during Twilight and this is where dwarf really scores no alignment no calibration use daylight photo mode Point double tap Focus shoot finish couldn't be easier same for the sun just be careful to put the sun filters on first over both cameras and then same same point shoot maybe settle with a convenient exposure time and I increased the saturation to bring out the yellows but that's all and here are sunspots darker and cooler areas of the surface of the Sun captured through dwarf from my backyard the Sun Moon even planets Jupiters moons star cluster nebula galaxies time to sum this review up here are my pros and cons the pros dwarf 2 is light and mobile only one bag fits everything and it weighs only 1.8 kilograms and that includes everything even the tripod and the filters and this bag is robust and no no no don't throw dwarf too please don't don't bully the baby telescope no dwarf 2 can be used in many different situations daylight Birds planes panoramas and stuff and at night stars star cluster nebula galaxies and the other stuff the battery lasts for several hours and can be recharged very easily simply plug USBC into a draw from that start dwarf 2 is fast after a few nights I can set it up in seconds and then it just does its job it occupies my smartphone though so that's a pain but it rewards me with little cool Astro images so it's probably Fair the resulting Imaging quality for such a small device is very cool I like the results and you can definitely use them to get your feed wet in the field of astronomy for a smart telescope for like any telescope dwarf is very cheap it costs only 400 bucks for an everything included package this is some money but an AstroWorld this is nearly free I mean we have filters alone in this price range or an adapter for a camera or I don't know a rabbit hole the overall building quality of dwarf really surprised me the package was Apple like the plastic is very solid the motors are extremely quiet and smooth the Optics look okay for the price and the bag the tripod everything for under 500 bucks in total you can't say a word heck even the filters look okay even though I didn't measure them but I will draw 2 has a great focal length of let's say field of view for most deep Sky objects Andromeda the Orion Nebula they fill the screen only planets will be way too small dwarf saves the subframes of Astra images as separate Tiff file so you can stack them later with your dedicated software on the PC this is great and this must never stop this is crucial to me and other using this device okay the other side homework still to do for dwarf lab the first two points don't really count dwarf does still cost around 400 bucks so for someone new to all this Astro stuff this might still be a very big pile of money luckily though dwarf 2 can perform on several Fields so that flattens that a bit dwarf 2 is not made for planetary Imaging because of the focal length you will be able to see the moons of Jupiter and that is really cool uh there's no comparison with a dedicated setup for planetary Imaging and while planetary Imaging is what brings most people into astronomy dwarf starts with the real stuff I don't know whether this is a pro or con but maybe dwarf 2 should sell a Barlow adapter for the filter holder a simple three times Barlow would do the trick and that would be awesome another small point please label the solar filters 1 in 1 million is not a label that newcomers can recognize the Tiff files are not labeled correctly I want to import them into DSS and the program should automatically figure out the gain and exposure time and stuff this must be written in to the meter data of the files and that would be cool okay software bug fixing sometimes the calibration failed unclear of why sometimes the go-to wouldn't Center the objects sometimes the dwarf 2 froze a bite very rarely and I had to reboot it nothing big just work in progress but please keep updating the software for a while good software maintenance gives the customer a good feeling know the major points for this project to truly be a great telescope dwarf 2 has no autofocus this is until now a real problem for easy out-of-the-box usage finding focus in astra's heart and dwarf 2 should make this as easy as possible because if you have skipped the focus at daylight or if you like me messed up everything by accidentally double tapping on the screen and you have no Jupiter in the nice guy you will have some serious problems finding the right Focus Point modern telescope software like Nina uses automatic procedures where the scope shifts the focus ever so slightly and measures the diameter of the Stars to figure figure out the perfect and I mean perfect Focus automatically the one button in Astra mode must be the real goal because everything else frightens people especially beginners to argue along similar lines the entire calibration step must be fully automated Place dwarf touch nothing Press Start and go it must be as easy as that luckily this is only software work needed because the hardware of dwarf is cool enough how high shall I point dwarf's alt axis during calibration I don't want to know and I don't want to care this continues with the slightly confusing menus I don't want to click go to to choose the Target and then click more to get to the image settings and choose the number of images how many images shall I take as a beginner anyway my Google phone set to Astra mode just keeps taking frames and frames and frames and whenever I'm bored or if I'm happy with the result I stop the process and click stop dwarf lab needs to make it one flow dwarf 2 takes you through the process plays me on flat ground my calibration is done what Target do you want to visit and that's that no manual start or restart or calibration no ending of go to or whatever dwarf needs to take care of all that plate serving go to focus alignment everything and by itself it does those individual subroutines already very good but every subroutine of this needs to be addressed separately from the user a true smart telescope for beginners needs to be as simple as possible and here the dwarf lab folks need to finalize their app design the telescope itself is really cool just streamline the app and you have a superb product same goes for visualizing the results so the Stacked image the histogram tool is cool for folks like me who love four-year Transformations very badly but newcomers want to click one button and have the outer stretch enabled by default because what the heck is auto stretch I want to see the Glorious Galaxy just let dwarf do automatically do this job and stack and stretch the images like Nina and deep Sky sticker do this and the customers will fall off that hey folks it's post-processing me dwarf Labs sent me some very interesting update infos just in time they have been working on the firmware of dwarf 2 and already integrated some of the recommendations of the Astro Community very cool the new features are go-to for the planets and the moon so from now on you can directly search for the moon or the planet and maybe use the moons of Jupiter to achieve perfect Focus cool some minor changes to the go-to functionality so from now on dwarf will first slew to the Target and then play itself to see whether the target is right in the center of the screen or not and maybe re-sloo and that is great because up until now we had some problems if the initial view was obstructed dwarf was not able to initially play itself and then the go-to would fail this is a great Improvement most importantly in Astro mode they added an unlinked outer stretch to the software this is super important because as I said newcomers don't want to bother with histograms they want to see the Glorious Galaxy and now dwarf 2 can take care of their on its own this is awesome even more importantly they claim that Astra autofocus is under construction if they can pull this off this will be a game changer to this project I'm really looking forward to this update I'm very pleased with the development so far as I said software development is super important and the fact that dwarf 2 listens to the community and already integrated some of the recommendations and missing features is very very promising I'm looking forward to testing all the new features on the Dark Skies Reign until now but I keep you updated over and out now what I mean the final question is would I recommend this little body to others would I even buy it myself given the pros and the cons and given the 400 bucks on the one hand but also given the results of the other hand yes and no I mean it truly depends on what you're aiming for if you don't have any equipment yet and you don't mind the 400 bucks you seek for an easy and portable setup and the little stargazing time with your friends though dwarf 2 lacks the ability of letting you see through an eyepiece you can still see fantastic galaxies and nebulous on your smartphone screen even from inside no Hubble images though nothing professional and some work is still to be done by you like focusing so your friends need to be a bit patient but nothing we're like a full night of dedicated astrophotography and in the end those images are your own very cool way to step into the world comparable systems like only Stella EV scope or vionas Delena or vespara are bigger and way more expensive and thereby dwarf is a great compromise between price and the results on the other hand if you have 400 bucks and you already have a camera system like your DSLR plus a lens and you really want to get your feet wet and step into astrophotography with all the side effects like tracking exposure time coordinate system alt us Etc you know that geeky stuff and you're not afraid to learn a lot then I would recommend a solid star Trekker like this one place your camera on top and start exploring the universe not easy not simple but amazing Please be aware this path leads to Total bankruptcy I mean literally I just want to mention that here because there was a major debate point about the upper mentioned smart Scopes already on the market those telescopes do not intend to replace dedicated Astro gear obviously you get way better results spending thousands of bucks on a dedicated system capable of Performing well on a single subfield of astronomy who would have thought so dwarf 2 is not meant for me as a semi-professional astrophotographer but for the beginner who wants to show the nearest galaxy to their friends and truth be told know that I have the dwarf baby scope I will use it a lot as well and this is mainly due to its flexibility and the easy setup and the portability it normally costs a fair amount of time and mental energy to set up another Imaging array now while waiting I can just plug and play the new toy while waiting for the big guys to finish their drops and maybe use this time to try something new with a drove or if I go on vacation I will take dwarf with me for sure one small back no additional cables no stuff my normal setup is an a shed and super stationary and the portable Imaging setup is a mess as well camera scope car battery cables adapters tripods combination assistant laptop focuser bags barting of Max oh boy I mean dwarf can't replace that by no means and neither can it produce similar results so I will go out in the fields with all that stuff but sometimes something like that is just not feasible going on a family trip abroad for example I can't take my entire telescope stuff with me but dwarf just toss it into the bag this is the most important positive factor for me I can take Astro images and I can take them anywhere if just dwarf LAB Works on the recommendations with their app dwarf will be a great product overall that was my take on dwarf do you have your own opinions or stories about dwarf 2 or similar smart telescopes do you have any further recommendations or wishes to dwarf lab place them down in the comment sections below I'll try to answer them all you captured images using dwarf 2 I'd love to see them tag me on Twitter or Instagram or here on YouTube I'm looking forward to seeing your results thanks again to dwarf lab for sending me dwarf 2 to play around with it and for answering all my questions like within minutes good time time I will link all the other great reviews about dwarf2 done by other astrofolks down in the video descriptions please make sure to watch them all and so that's it and as always I say clear skies everyone until next time here on catching photons [Music]

Channel: catchingphotons

Views: 236,960

Keywords: Astro, Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescope, Tutorial, night sky, sky, space, photography, visual astronomy, how to, DWARF, DWARF2, DWARFII, DWARFLAB, Smart Telescope, dwarf ii, dwarf 2, DWARF ii, DWARF 2

Id: Es5D6XemLdk

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 02 2023