The original article was published on Popular Astronomy.

POPULAR ASTRONOMY "ASTRONOMER’S NOTEBOOK" Feature
By Stuart Atkinson
Approx 750w
Plus illustrations
Date submitted: May 5th 2025

Unless you’ve been living in a lava tube on Mars for the past year, you’ll know that SeeStars – and other “smart telescopes” - are a very hot topic at the moment, with two very different and vocal camps speaking for and against them. So what’s the truth hiding behind the hype and the hate?

If you don’t know what they are, “smart telescopes” are essentially motorised tracking cameras. You don’t look through them, you look at the images they take, on your phone, tablet or laptop. Using the app you point the telescope to a target in the sky, chosen either from the database in the app or using its own (excellent) star atlas and then, after calibration, the telescope slews around to point to that object. After a bit of whirring and chugging it starts taking short exposures, and "stacks" them together internally to create one single, long, high resolution exposure. You can then either just take that basic jpg image and work on it, or you can download the individual RAW frames taken by the telescope and process them into a single image yourself. Sounds amazing, right?

So what’s the problem? Well, like Marmite, and every new series of Doctor Who, people either love them or think they are the spawn of Satan. Since they appeared on the market their fans have hailed them as “the next step in astronomy”, while others have grabbed pitchforks and flaming torches and marched through the streets condemning them as monsters and abominations.

Confession time. I myself was very doubtful about smart telescopes at first, even hostile. I was firmly in the “they’re just glorified cameras” camp. But more and more people I knew, respected and trusted started to win me over to them with their enthusiasm and passion for them, and by posting on social media the results they were achieving. And eventually I got one too.

So why did I turn to the Dark Side? What finally convinced me was seeing an image a friend took with his SeeStar at Kielder Starcamp earlier in the year. After imaging a globular cluster, M3, he was puzzled by a smudge near the cluster which wasn’t on any of his astro apps – or mine. Eventually someone figured out that it was a mag 18 galaxy, many hundreds of millions of light years away – and he’d imaged it with his SeeStar, plonked on a bench outside his camper van, on a less-than-perfect night. I was won over, and bought one from a vendor at the event two days later… and then the clouds rolled in, of course…

Almost three months later, I’m totally won over. I have used my SeeStar for imaging galaxies, nebulae and star clusters. It takes wonderfully detailed images of the Moon, and excellent sunspot images too. 

But, and this is the important thing, it hasn’t replaced all my other gear. I still take long exposure wide field photos with my DSLR. I still look at the Sun visually – with a solar filter fitted, of course – through my 4.5” reflector. And I still peer into the eyepiece of my 8” Dobsonian and lose myself in the grey-green veils of the Orion Nebula, the star-clotted spiral arms of M31 and the ghostly smoke ring of M57. 

My SeeStar hasn’t replaced my other pieces of equipment, it’s complemented them.

Smart telescopes aren’t going to destroy amateur astronomy, that’s just silly. Remember how those new-fangled GoTo telescopes were the spawn of the devil when they first appeared? People who had grown up using Setting Circles and tea-stained copies of Norton’s Star Atlas called them lazy and cheating, but amateur astronomy survived. The same will happen with these smart telescopes. It’s just evolution.

“But they’re not telescopes! You can’t look through them!” some cry. That’s true. But no-one physically looks through the Hubble or JWST either, they’re just very big cameras, and no-one says they shouldn’t be called telescopes, do they?

Love them or loathe them, smart telescopes are here to stay. If you would rather look at the night sky with your own eyes, through a telescope eyepiece, that’s fine! But not everyone has the patience, equipment, budget or time to do that. For people who just want to take their own pictures of the universe, without having to learn the Hogwarts sorcery of traditional camera-on-telescope image processing, smart telescopes are a gift.

Bottom line? If smart telescopes help people to appreciate the beauty of the night sky then they can’t be a bad thing.

Stuart Atkinson