Astrophotography

Two smart telescopes now on pre-order finally push past the 50 mm aperture that every Seestar uses. The Vaonis Atlas, announced on October 15, carries an 80 mm f/4.5 module for $3,990 on pre-order (until November 15, then $4,990), with deliveries due in March 2027. The DWARFLAB Draco, which opened for orders in September, is a 90 mm f/3.8 for $1,599 in its SHO Edition, and new orders are quoted at roughly three months to ship. I haven’t touched either one, so this is spec-sheet arithmetic from someone who has run a 50 mm Seestar S50 off a Bortle 7 balcony in Nicosia for most of a year. In short, the extra aperture gets you to the same image in roughly a third of the time and puts about 1.5 times as many pixels across a small galaxy. It doesn’t make a nebula any brighter per pixel. On paper, Draco is the better buy for a city balcony at well under half the Atlas price. ...

ZWO’s Seestar S50 Pro started shipping on September 1 and now lists at $999 (€999 in Europe) on ZWO’s product page, after an $899 launch price that ended on September 15. I’ve run the original S50 from my Bortle 7 balcony in Nicosia for most of a year, so the question I care about is narrow: if you already own an S50, what does $999 buy you? It buys the same light grasp and the same pixel scale, roughly 3.7 times the sky per frame, a 67% bigger battery, a wide-angle camera, and a main sensor nobody expected. For most S50 owners imaging from a city, I’d hold off. For a few, it fixes the exact thing that’s been annoying them. ...

Somewhere in the next few weeks the first properly damp night of autumn will cut an observing session short, and it won’t be cloud that does it. A film of water forms on the front of the telescope, the stars go soft, then milky, then gone, and you spend twenty minutes with a battery hairdryer wondering where the sky went. That’s dew, and it’s the most avoidable way to lose a clear night. Here’s what forms it, what stops it, and where you can stop spending — because the cheapest fix is often enough, and some of you don’t need to buy anything at all. ...

The single most useful thing I can tell you before the Perseids peak this week: leave the star tracker at home. For meteors you want the opposite of what a tracker gives you: a wide, fixed field of sky and a long run of short exposures, waiting for something to fall into frame. A camera, a fast wide lens, a sturdy tripod, and a cheap intervalometer will catch Perseids all night. That’s the whole kit. ...

The ZWO Seestar S50 I reviewed in May is out of production. Walk into the smart-telescope aisle today and the Seestar you can actually buy new is a 30 mm scope: the S30 or the S30 Pro. The “successor” has 20 mm less aperture than the thing it replaced. If you’ve spent any time reading telescope forums, that sentence should make you flinch, because aperture is the one number those forums agree on. The question I keep getting emailed: does a 30 mm smart telescope give up too much from a light-polluted balcony, and should you hunt down a used S50 instead? ...

On a June night in Nicosia, ambient 30°C at 11 pm with no breeze, I ran a 40-minute stack on the eastern Veil Nebula with the Seestar S50. The final image looked passable at full zoom-out. At 100% crop the background was peppered with hot pixels, and the faintest filaments had disappeared into a warm, grainy haze that no processing could salvage. The same target in March, with nighttime temps around 14°C, had noticeably more contrast in those faint regions. Same scope. Same integration time. Same processing. The only variable was temperature. ...

The August 12 total solar eclipse is 55 days out. If you’re planning to photograph it, point a telescope at it, or just watch the partial phases safely, you need a solar filter. Prices are still normal and stock is still available. By late July neither will be true. Here’s what the numbers on the label mean, which filters are worth the money, and what I’m packing for Spain. The one number on every solar filter: optical density Every solar filter blocks a fraction of the Sun’s light. The spec you care about is optical density (OD), a logarithmic scale. OD 5 means only 10^-5 of the incoming light gets through — one hundred-thousandth. OD 4 passes ten times more. That factor of ten is the line between safe for your eyes and not. ...

I shoot from a fourth-floor balcony in Nicosia. Bortle 7 on a clear night, Bortle 8 when the football pitch lights are on. Every spring, someone in the astrophotography forums asks: “Which filter should I buy for light-polluted skies?” The answers range from “get an L-Pro” to “move to the countryside.” Neither is particularly useful if you’re standing on a balcony with a one-shot colour camera and two hours before the neighbour’s security light comes on. ...