Buying guide

Smart telescopes

Start here, because most reviews bury it: you do not look through these. There is no eyepiece. A smart telescope is a camera on a motorised mount that finds a target, stacks exposures, and builds an image on your phone. Whether that is wonderful or disappointing depends entirely on what you wanted.

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What you are actually buying

Point a smart telescope at the Andromeda Galaxy and after ten minutes of stacking you will have a colour photograph with dust lanes and a bright core, from a suburban back garden, with no processing knowledge. Point a $700 Dobsonian at the same object from the same garden and you will see a faint grey oval. The camera wins on image, comprehensively.

What the camera cannot give you is the thing that makes people fall in love with this hobby: ancient light landing on your retina in real time. Those photons left Andromeda two and a half million years ago and ended their journey inside your eye. A screen is a screen, whatever is on it. Plenty of people own both for exactly this reason.

The state of the market in September 2026

This category moves faster than the guides covering it, and two things happened recently that most pages have not caught up with. The ZWO Seestar S50, the model that made smart telescopes popular, has ended production, so anything you see at clearance pricing is the older 2.1 megapixel sensor. And the entry-level Seestar S30 at $399 is sold out with no restock date. What that leaves, in stock and current, is the S30 Pro, the S50 Pro and the Dwarf 3.

What to buy

Best for most people

ZWO Seestar S30 Pro

$699
30mm quadruplet APO, 160mm f/5.3, 8.29MP 4K main sensor plus a 63 degree wide lens

The current sweet spot in smart telescopes, and the one that is actually in stock.

The original S30 at $399 was the value pick and is sold out with no restock date. The Pro replaces it with a better instrument: a four element apochromatic lens, a 4K sensor with four times the pixels of the old model, and a second wide-angle camera that frames Milky Way landscapes the narrow optic cannot. It sets itself up, finds the target and stacks exposures while the image builds on your phone.

The catch: Seven hundred dollars is no longer impulse territory, and the gap to the original S30 price is real.

Check price at High Point Scientific
Best for wide targets and travel

DwarfLab Dwarf 3

$549
35mm aperture, 8.3MP sensor, 2.9 by 1.7 degree field, 1.35kg

The wide-field alternative. Better for big objects, better for travel.

Its field of view is more than twice as wide as the Seestar's, which matters more than it sounds: Andromeda, the North America Nebula and the Pleiades fit in a single frame instead of needing a mosaic. It weighs half what an S50 does, tracks a little more stably in equatorial mode, and doubles as a long lens for wildlife in daylight.

The catch: No tripod in the box, so budget for one. The smaller aperture shows on faint compact targets.

Check price at High Point Scientific
Best for faint compact targets

ZWO Seestar S50 Pro

$999
50mm aperture, successor to the discontinued S50

The pick if you care most about faint compact targets: galaxies, globular clusters, planetary nebulae.

Aperture decides how much light reaches the sensor, and fifty millimetres gathers nearly three times as much as thirty. On small bright targets that shows up as detail rather than noise. The original S50 is the model that made this category popular; production has ended, so clearance units are the older sensor and the Pro is the current one.

The catch: A thousand dollars also buys a very good eight inch Dobsonian and a decent eyepiece set. Those are different hobbies, not competing products.

Check price at High Point Scientific

Aperture still decides everything

Thirty millimetres against fifty is not a small difference: the larger opening gathers nearly three times the light. Sensors and stacking software have narrowed the gap, because stacking a hundred short exposures recovers signal that a single frame would lose in noise, but they have not closed it. On small faint targets, aperture still wins. On large bright targets, field of view matters more, which is why the smaller Dwarf 3 beats both Seestars on Andromeda.

Who should not buy one

Anyone who has never looked through a telescope. Spend $45 on binoculars first and find out whether you enjoy being outside in the cold looking up, because that is the actual hobby and no amount of hardware creates the taste for it. Anyone whose real interest is planets: these instruments have short focal lengths and are built for faint extended objects, and a $300 Dobsonian will show more detail on Jupiter and Saturn than a $1,000 smart telescope. And anyone who wants to learn the sky, because a machine that finds everything for you means you never learn where anything is.

We do not currently earn anything from these links. Nobody pays to appear here. How we pick gear.