by James Wallace Harris, 11/24/23
Last night I watched two videos on YouTube that reviewed the Seestar S50 “smart telescope.” It’s an amazing $499 go-to telescope that does astrophotography automatically. It works in conjunction with your smartphone. You take the telescope outside and set it up level, then use your smartphone to tell it what astronomical object to photograph, and it does everything else. You can go back inside and monitor the Seestar S50 by smartphone.
But does it make astrophotography too easy? The reviewer mentions that question and says no. But I know if I bought the Seestar S50 I would play with it a couple of time and then leave it in a closet. (Unless I felt challenged to find ways to push the device to its limits.)
A couple of decades ago I wanted to get into digital astrophotography. I even bought a $60 how-to book. At the time, it was both too expensive and too difficult for me. The learning curve was extremely high. I had a 120mm cheap refractor that was fun to look through, but a bitch to carry around and set up. And it didn’t have the mount to handle photography. And except for the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, I needed to drive an hour out of town to the astronomy club’s viewing site to see deep sky stuff. I eventually gave my telescope to a lady who wanted to get into astronomy. I lost interest in what I could see with just by eyes. The next step was photography, and it was too big to take at the time.
After I retired and have gotten older, I’ve thought about getting another telescope, but a smaller one. After having hernia surgery, I don’t want to risk picking up heavy stuff. The Seestar S50 would be light enough, and cheap enough. And it takes better photographs than what I fantasized about doing twenty years ago.
Astronomy is a deceptive hobby. You see the great astrophotography in Sky & Telescope and think that’s what you’ll see when you look through a telescope. It’s not. Even with expensive scopes, deep sky objects are just patches of fuzzy gray blobs of lights in the eyepiece. Cameras, both film and digital gather greater amounts of light by making time exposures, sometimes hours long. What the Seestar S50 does is take a series of ten second exposures that build up the image over time. The longer you spend photographing an object the better it looks. Watch both videos to see what I mean.
What you see on your smartphone using the Seestar S50 is way more than what you see looking through an eyepiece. And real astronomers seldom look through eyepieces. However, is looking at your iPhone really what you want?
In this second film, we see how traditional digital astrophotography is done. It involves a lot of equipment and software. It’s a skill that takes time to master but look at the results. (Watch the entire video here but the results in the video below are stunning.)
The 80mm APO looks so good I can’t help but think the guy is fooling us with a photo from the Hubble telescope.
What is the goal here? To have a photograph of something in the sky you claim to have taken? The Seestar S50 will do that. But what did you do? Paid $499. Isn’t the real goal to learn how to take an astrophotograph by learning how it’s done? Doesn’t it also involve the desire to know how to find objects in the night sky? Isn’t what we really want is knowing how to do something, and do it well?
Computers are starting to do everything for us. And by adding AI, it will soon be possible to do a lot of complex tasks by just asking a computer. People now create beautiful digital art by assembling keywords into a prompt.
I know it’s impossible to turn back progress. I wouldn’t want to give up computers, but I’m not sure I want computers to do everything for me. Of course, everyone is different. Some people will be happy to have a computer do the entire job, while other people will take pleasure in doing something entirely by themselves. I don’t mind using a computer with word processing to write an essay, but I wouldn’t want the computer to write the essay for me.
I’m already seeing people give up their smartphones for dumb phones. I know people who have taken up drawing, painting, or water coloring by hand rather than use a computer art program.
I wonder if society will eventually reject computers. AI might push us over the limit. We could draw the limit at AI. Or we could draw the limit at an earlier stage of computer development. What if we gave up the internet too? Or set the clock back to 1983 before the Macintosh made graphical interfaces what everyone wanted. What if we limited computer technology to IBM AT personal computers, IBM 370 mainframes, and VAX 11 minicomputers? Humans had to work harder and know more to use that level of technology. But wasn’t using those old machines a lot more fun?
I don’t think we would turn off technological progress. I expect a Seestar S80 that does everything that guy could do with his $5000 computer for $399 in a few years and be even easier to use. And in ten years people will have robots with eyes like telescopes, and if you want a photography of M31, you’d just say to your robot, “Robbie, go take a picture of M31 for me.”
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
You’re right, computer technology was more interesting back when it was still novel. Back then we were impressed, we were fascinated, we loved playing around with it and figuring out what it could do.
I remember standing in line at a bank (wow, standing in line at a bank … I haven’t done that in years!); I was watching a computer screen behind the row of tellers. (Kids, tellers are like your online banking homepage.) The computer had a screensaver with flying toasters or something goofy like that. I was delighted. And remember Clippy popping up on your screen? (Kids, think of Clippy as Siri’s dark ages ancestor.) These days we’re rarely impressed; instead we feel entitled. We don’t have time to pause and feel grateful, we’re too eager for the next improvement. And the next and the next.
Thinking about this sort of stuff always brings into my mind that old movie Wall-E, when the humans spent all their time lounging in those hovering chairs, watching screens nonstop, and sipping their nutrition through straws because they had become useless lumps.
Back to your telescope: I used to love photography and fancied myself as an amateur who took pretty decent photos. I was kind of proud of figuring out how to use my Minolta SLR by myself. A few years back I thought about picking it up again, but it no longer had the same appeal. In the decades since my Minolta was my constant companion (pre-kids) the internet has inundated our world with billions of well-done photos. I guess it’s like when you spend a lot of time in a sweet shop and lose your sweet tooth.
Boy you sure prompted a lot of Thoughts in my lowly slow-poke Human brain!
What makes this interesting to me is that reviewers are getting color in nebulae. I can look at, for example, the Veil Nebula with my 6″ tabletop Dob and see it “live”. But if I want to see color I would have to get a 16″ or bigger Dob, and I know I wouldn’t really haul that monster out very often. I also know I don’t have the patience to fiddle with all the cables and equipment in most astrophotography setups. So this little SeeStar S50 does make sense to me. It doesn’t take the place of seeing stuff “live”, but it’s a great add-on for many of us.