My SeeStar S50 Full Review. Is It Worth The Hype?

[Music] hi I'm Walt and this is Delta astrophotography you may or may not have noticed that there's a big buzz going around about these new smart telescopes that are hitting the market these units that are a telescope a camera and a mount all built into one small porable device well I finally got my hands on one as well this is the zwo sear s50 so is it worth the hype find out in today's episode of It's [Applause] [Laughter] [Music] alive the zwo sear s50 is a a smart telescope Allin one unit it's a go-to mount it is a camera and a telescope all in one small portable package and it goes for around $500 that is about the same price as just my star tracker alone not even counting a modified DSLR camera and a lens or telescope of some kind it's an incredible deal I don't even know how they pull it off so zwo actually reached out to me and asked if I'd like to review one on my channel and of course I said yes but no money is exchanged hands I get the option of buying this unit from them when I'm done and they don't have any influence on my thoughts or opinions that's all me all right got that out of the way let's go check out the sea star let's go ahead and get this started shall [Applause] we all right here we go inside the box we have a rock a tiny windmill and a Rubik's Cube just kidding it's another box oh my gosh guys this looks amazing inside the box is another box Pandora's Box here I guess this is the actual case for it I've seen this in reviews already it's definitely like a hard foam super light I can definitely see me throwing this in the back of the car and traveling with it got my God you guys can see this but it's just two pieces it's just this is the tripod very heavy duty nice firm feeling tripod here we've got the actual unit itself it's even smaller than I thought it was going to be and this is the solar filter this is one of the most exciting things about this setup for me because this will make photographing the eclipse next year so much easier one hour later okay I'm back already I figured it I just go ahead and fire this thing up for the first time with you I want you to join me for this another thing I left out earlier is this also came with this uh charging cable it's got uh charging port on the back it looks like it's USBC I believe I've downloaded the sear app on my phone so I'm just going to find that and open it up and we're going to go from there okay it looks like I'm supposed to turn this on first so let's go I guess it's on powering on ready to connect this thing just spoke to me she asked me why and I just went on and told her what on Earth are you up to this time well she keeps saying she's ready to connect so I figured we just spend the afternoon getting to know one another so let's talk a little bit about what the sea star is made up of the tripod is made out of carbon fiber and I believe aluminum alloy and it's very solid very sturdy and it's it's built a lot lot like the manf froto tripod I used to have very high quality tripod that was unfortunately stolen from me now this is as tall as the tripod gets so you better get comfortable sitting on a stool or on the ground or find you a good sturdy solid table to set this on but I haven't had any luck with that I just like to put it on the ground this right here this is actually a go-to mount that's right it'll actually point to whatever you tell it to just connect your phone to it tell it to go to whatever object that you can find or think of and it'll automa Al point right at it and track it throughout the night now the tracking mount's not perfect it is an ALT as or altitude asmith Mount instead of an equatorial Mount if you don't already know let's talk about the difference between an ALT as Mount and an equatorial mount an ALT as Mount can only move up down left and right now at this point we're going to use a little help from my friend The Intergalactic space mustard this is going to represent an object rising in the night sky it'll come up over here in the East maybe in the Southeast like Orion and as it gets higher it will rotate like this and by the time it's setting it'll be upside down when photographing a target with an ALT as Mount it's going to capture the Target coming up like this then you'll look at a picture 30 minutes later and it'll probably look a little bit more like this then a little bit later it'll probably look something like this and then later on something like this and it's very difficult to stack all that without getting horrible stacking artifacts and you can't do really long exposures because you might actually catch this thing rotating within the exposure causing it to streak Trail get blurry whatever an equatorial Mount or a equatorial star tracker on the other hand will actually rotate the camera's field of view along with the object as it's moving kind of like [Music] this that will allow your target to keep the exact same framing all night now inside here is actually a triplet apochromatic refractor telescope with a focal length of 250 mm and an F ratio of f 4.9 that's insane this thing is running about $499 and it's hard to find a triplet refractor telescope especially an apochromatic refractor telescope anywhere near that price now triplet APO chromatic basically means it's got three glass elements inside of here that's used to correct for chromatic aberration or when you're colors don't quite all focus at the same time I actually own a triplet APO chromatic refractor telescope I'm going to get tired of saying that and uh this thing definitely costs more than the SE star just the telescope and got the camera right here on the back this is about 275 mm it's a radian 61 I believe sharpstar had one that was much cheaper and it was the exact same specs but anyway does the SE star SE kind of what this sees not at all it's dramatically different and that has a lot to do with the built-in camera inside here is a small camera that uses the Sony IMX 462 sensor that is a tiny sensor that's typically used in planetary cameras like this this is not the same one but it has a similar sensor size can you see that in there that's the size of the entire sensor like I said this is not the exact same camera and sensor but they are very close so what does a field of view with a tiny sensor and a 250 mm telescope look like the field of view you get with the sear is along the lines of this that's right this is a Celestron C1 now I've got the reducer corrector on it bringing it down to about 1,700 mimish yeah the field of view of that paired with a fullframe sensor camera is almost identical to the sear let's actually jump onto the computer and check out a field of view calculator and see just how close they are okay this is astronomy tools field of view calculator I'll leave a link to this in the description below if you ever want to check it out we're going to switch to Imaging mode up here and we're just going to make this comparison using the moon because everybody's used to seeing the moon for the telescope we're going to give it a focal length of 250 mm cuz that's what the C star is and for the camera let's see what it looks like with a fullframe Canon camera I have the Canon 6D there we go now I'm going to click add to view so this red box here is the field of view with a 250 mm telescope and a fullframe cannon camera and as you can see the moon is Tiny it is absolutely tiny now let's come back up here and change the camera to the sea star sensor there we go that's the sensor the sea star uses right there click that click add to view now the yellow box is the field of view with the sear look at that I'm just going to x out of the Canon field of view so we can really see what this looks like that's incredible you're zoomed right in on the moon now let's do one more comparison we're going to compare the sear field of view to the giant Celestron C with a Canon camera field of view going to change the camera back to a Canon 6D there it is and for telescope I'm going to find the Celestron C11 in there there it is and I'm going to make sure I add in my reducer I have a 63 reducer there we go I'm going to add that to my field of view and there we go that's insane they're almost the exact same field of view the green box is the C11 with the Canon the yellow box is the SE star the sear is a little wider well that's about it so how easy is it to set up and work this thing let's go outside and find out right now okay now that I'm out here just going to set it down on the ground turn it on level it and get started powering on ready to connect so once it says ready to connect I go ahead and connect my phone to the Sears Wi-Fi network then I go ahead and open up the sear app it brings me to the home screen right here and it says that I need to level the sear so I click on that and now I have to move the tripod legs up and down until these two circles touch and turn green it can kind of be a frustrating process but it gets better once you get used to it now go ahead and click on the s50 blah blah blah blah blah icon at the top to get into my menu options and turn the anti-do on because that is extremely important around here as you can see we have horrible du problems down here in the South I'm so glad this comes with an anti-do feature we can scroll down to the advanced features at the bottom and turn on save all frames so we can save all our light frames just in case we want to Stack our own files later now back at the home menu we can choose the options of stargazing solar lunar planetary or scenery I usually go with stargazing so we're going to hit that now at the bottom right we have our planetarium feature it looks like the Big Dipper we can tap that and it gives us a map of the sky and we can scroll around and select a Target that way or we can go up to the top right and hit objects and it gives us a menu with tonight's best and a lot more options to choose a Target to shoot we can also go back to the home menu and look at tonight's best as well which is what I'm going to do because I'm just going to go for m42 the oran nebula I'm going to tap go gazing finding object now the sear is going to slew right to the Orion [Music] Nebula now over here on the right side of the screen you can see the filter option this is a dual narrow band filter that comes built into the sear and this is a great light pollution filter it blocks out most light Except for hydrogen Alpha and oxygen 3 light and it's great for emission nebula and not so good for galaxies and reflection nebula but luckily the sear can determine that for you and it will choose not to use it if you're doing a reflection nebula or Galaxy but you can also manually turn it on and off whenever you want right here there's also an autofocus button yeah this thing autofocuses autofocusing hell yeah autofocus completed once we're done focusing we can just tap the red button here on the bottom preparing for image enhancing and it's going to start taking dark frames for us start enhancing image okay so when it's enhancing the image it's basically taking a bunch of 10-second frames and each time it takes a new one it Stacks it on top of the previous one and the new image just keeps getting brighter and brighter this is a a process called Liv stacking look at that that's just two frames this is Incredible 1 hour [Music] later so who is the sear for and what are some of the pros and cons of getting one of these things well they are definitely for begin beginners that don't want to go out and spend $2,000 and then climb the mountain of a steep learning curve to try to figure out how to work all this unbelievably expensive equipment they can just spend $500 on one of these and get started immediately it's for the Casual astronomy Enthusiast that doesn't really want to get into all the technical aspects of Photography just yet it's for the traveler always on the go and needs to travel light I don't know where we're going but we're going somewhere woohoo it's for the person who wants to photograph galaxies and Galaxy season but doesn't want to spend $3,000 on a Schmid cerra telescope it's for a group of friends sitting outside together just enjoying the wonders of space Oh man check out the iris nebula tonight wow I haven't been here in 12,000 years want to go it's for the lazy astronomer that doesn't want to spend hours setting up carrying heavy equipment of the yard leveling your tripods setting up your Mount adding counterweights balancing focusing in your main scope focusing your guide scope polar aligning the weather people lied it's clear outside are you serious hell yeah let's go cating the telescope taking the goat to Walmart starting Auto guiding taking 5 minute test shots taking 3 minute you know you get what I'm saying all you got to do is just set this out in the yard and hit go with it being so easy and portable I would say this is for everybody I can't think of too many bad things to say about it but there are just a few the alt as design is a little frustrating I'd rather be taking 3 minute exposures and stacking about 60 of those but instead I'm taking 10-second exposures and stacking maybe an hour's worth CU after an hour or two you really get bad stacking artifacts because of the rotation the tiny field of view because of the camera small sensor can be a little frustrating at times as well just when you want to photograph something wide or you need a crop and there's just not enough room to crop because you're already so zoomed in but that's just a small nitpick now the biggest problem I have with this by far and this might just be my unit but when it gets really cold outside and I mean like below freezing the dead grass has frosted over and it crunches beneath your feet cold yeah when it's that cold this thing starts to malfunction or at least the Wi-Fi does and I cannot connect to it my phone just refuses to connect to this when it's super cold outside I bring it back inside and it connects just fine when it gets back into the the warmth of my living room but out there I don't know I just can't get it to connect and that's kind of a drive because right now in the winter season there's some of the best targets out there and so I'm trying to find a workaround a way to warm this thing up what it's outside so I can still use it in the winter luckily though I live in the south and it's not going to get super freezing very much and we only get a couple of weeks of that out of the year so it's not going to be a huge deal for me if you live up north though that might be a problem for you I've been having so much fun in the last month and a half using the sea star I've been able to shoot everything from the Sun to the Moon to a lot of deep Sky targets that I normally wouldn't be able to shoot just because they're so far away it's been great I've been able to do it all casually not much effort at all this is definitely the unit that I'm going to be taking with me when I go photograph the eclipse in 2024 in April this will now be a crucial part of my deep Sky rig when I go traveling out to the desert it'll go right alongside my star treer and DSLR camera when I'm doing nightscapes well guys there's been a a lot of stuff going on lately I've been working a lot and I've finally got some free time to sit back do some more astrophotography and make some more YouTube videos and there's so much to talk about I got these incredible filters from alter they've been a game changer and I can't wait to talk more about these and I've been testing those new filters out with a new rig check it out I'm so excited about this guys I can't wait to show you what it does make some more videos about it and don't worry I'm not going to get away from DSLR and lens photography I'm still going to be doing a lot of that this is just the next step on my astrophotography journey I'll be leaving a link down in the description below where you can buy a sea star if you really want one and I guess that's going to wrap it up for today guys thank you so much for watching if you liked anything learned anything please let me know down in the comments give me a like Please Subscribe and all that good stuff so as always stay Spacey clear skies watch out for snakes see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Delta Astrophotography

Views: 47,316

Keywords: smart telescope, astrophotography, seestar

Id: BO2dr6i54YQ

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2023