ZWO Seestar S50 Pro Smart Telescope

The Seestar S50 Pro is not a telescope you look through. It is a 50 mm camera-telescope on its own motorised mount: you choose an object in the Seestar app on your phone, and it levels itself, works out where it is pointing, slews to the target, focuses and starts taking short exposures. It stacks those frames as it goes, so the picture on your screen gets cleaner and more detailed the longer you leave it, and you save the result to your phone.

Inside is a 4-element apochromatic lens with ED glass, 50 mm across with a 260 mm focal length (f/5.2), in front of an 8.3-megapixel OmniVision OS08B10 sensor. The field of view is 2.8 degrees on the long side, about five full Moons, which suits large nebulae, galaxies and star clusters. A second, wide-angle camera with a 63-degree view helps the telescope find its place in the sky and shows where it is pointing.

The filter that matters most in Pakistan is the built-in dual-band light-pollution filter, which passes the hydrogen-alpha and oxygen-III light that emission nebulae give off. From a rooftop in Karachi or Lahore it can bring out the Orion Nebula, the Lagoon and the Veil, which are hard to show at all from a city by eye. It does much less for galaxies, which shine in ordinary starlight. Andromeda still shows from a city, but a drive out to a darker sky makes a clear difference to every galaxy.

Be clear about what it is not. It is not a planetary telescope: at 260 mm focal length Jupiter and Saturn come out as small discs, the rings and cloud bands visible but tiny. The Moon fills a good part of the frame and photographs well. What you see is a processed, stacked image on a screen, built up over minutes. Nobody puts an eye to this telescope, and nobody with a conventional telescope sees colour like this through an eyepiece.

For daytime and solar use it comes with a magnetic solar filter. Never point the Seestar at the Sun without that filter fitted, and keep it on for the whole session. Unfiltered sunlight damages the sensor in seconds.

Power is practical for local conditions. The 10,000 mAh battery is rated by ZWO at up to 9 hours (a lab figure, in warm weather), and the telescope charges or runs from USB-C at 5V/3A or 12V/3A, so a good power bank keeps it going through load-shedding or at a dark site with no mains. ZWO rates it for -10 to 40 degrees C. On the hottest summer nights in Sindh and southern Punjab the air can stay above that limit well after dark, so an evening that has cooled down is the time to use it. It stores about 100 GB of images on board and connects to the phone over 5 GHz or 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi.

It weighs 2.8 kg and folds to 140 x 149 x 268 mm, so it travels in a carry case to a farmhouse, a hill station or a school field. Set-up takes a few minutes and needs no knowledge of the sky, which makes it a good first instrument for a family, a school or anyone who wants deep-sky photographs without learning a mount and camera first. It also has an equatorial mode for longer exposures, which needs accurate polar alignment.

This is an imported ZWO instrument, sold on Telescopes.pk alongside our Made in Pakistan telescopes. If you want to look through an eyepiece yourself and see the planets in more detail, one of our reflectors suits you better. If you want photographs of nebulae and galaxies with almost no learning curve, the Seestar is the more direct route.