Another night with Seestar

Note: these are my initial impressions of this telescope. I will continue to add to this article over the next few days, and eventually I might add a "long term review" article. If so, I'll add a link to it here.

After a few days of rain, or just overcast, I was finally able to take my Seestar Smart Telescope out again. (My first light blog post is here. Some of the photos from that post are reproduced here.)

In Houston, we have quite a problem with mosquitoes much of the year. With the Seestar, I assemble it inside, and quickly set it down and power it up outside. The rest of the setup I'm able to do from inside. (As a matter of fact, I'm currently monitoring a photo stack of the Andromeda galaxy from the second floor of my house.)

As far as field size goes, it's somewhat wide, although not wide enough to capture the entire Andromeda galaxy without doing a mosaic. It's good for planetary nebula, reasonably large deep sky items, the sun (using the included solar filter), and the moon. The resolution isn't high enough for planets.

The Seestar has a built-in light pollution filter, which does a pretty good job. All of my below nebula photos used the filter from central Houston, which is a Bortle 8/9 sky.

All-in-all, I think it's a great grab-and-go telescope suitable for a wide variety of situations. I plan on using it as a primary and secondary scope going forward, depending on what I'm doing and where I'm going.