Ooh great timing! I've been working on a custom firmware replacement (Yocto base) + FOSS control app for existing smart telescopes with plans to release a beta in the next month or so. Currently I'm building out Support for the ZWO Seestars, Dwarf Mini/II/III, Vaonis Vespera, and Unistellar Odyssey (this one's very WIP though). Also working on a nice HAL and plugin system to make porting the CFW to new devices as simple as possible. To tie it all together the firmware also has an Alpaca server running on it.

Currently the state of software development for these smart scopes are...not good. I even wrote about the issues years ago when I "jailbroke" my Seestar S50[1]. With a proper open source solution + better quality gates, it's finally turning into something usable for us power users. I'll give ZWO credit for one thing though, at least they themselves finally admitted defeat and added native Alpaca support in the end.

If you do release your open source Seestar alternative, let me know and I'll write a HAL driver for it.

1: https://www.cloudynights.com/forums/topic/900861-seestar-s50...

It’s curious that this doesn’t exist really. All the components are there, location via GPS, the tracking mechanics are not particularly difficult once you know the orientation, and there are good open plate solvers.

Maybe good sensors suddenly became cheaper? Willingness to put a real computer in the control system? For a long time even potato quality CCDs were expensive and handset electronics have been awful.

There is https://observatorycontrolsystem.github.io/ on the scheduler side

Do you have a repo for this project? I would encourage you to work in the open, if you're not already.

Even a BOM would be helpful. Also understanding the post-processing/cleanup step would be interesting.

That’s correct. But don’t let that put you off. They’re simply for different things!

I have both an S30 Pro and an 8” motorized SCT. The wow factor of a real scope is not lost, I can assure you.

But I don’t take my big telescope camping, for example. It’s too big and awkward. The Seestar fits in a backpack, and spits out beautiful galaxy photos to use as phone wallpapers. I just leave it running all evening. It’s very neat.

> even using an app like Stellarium feels a bit like cheating.

Personally, I have no computers, phones or any electronic crap when I'm observing the sky. Just me and a manual telescope.

I look at the sky to get away from all that shite.

I'm interested in your eclipse experience. I tried capturing totality with a seestar S50 back in the 2024 eclipse. What I found is that at the very moment of totality, I had not removed the solar filter fast enough, and the bloody thing lost lock on tracking the Sun. Rather than fiddling with the equipment, I immediately started to ignore the 'scope and just experienced the eclipse.

That was the right thing to do!

But removing the solar filter right at the moment of totality is such an edge case (both for the software and my wetware which was kind of overwhelmed) that I wonder how others dealt with it?

I love astrophotography and yet sometimes ask myself this question. I can go to astrobin and get any possible image 10000x better than I could ever do.

But, why is anything worth doing? For most hobbies the fun is the doing not the result.

Why do woodworking when I can get a better quality piece for less in the store? Why fix my car when I could drop it off at the shop? Why travel anywhere when I can just get the same tourist trap photos from instagram?

How weird. It's almost as if 90% of amateur anything Youtube channels are actually advertisement businesses pushing the sponsored product of the day on their audiences. So weird.

Because a new model was just launched and they are allowed to publish the reviews now.

Yea thanks OP for tricking me into reading a several-page machine-generated ad. I'm sure forfeiting your dignity was worth a free telescope.

Thank you for sharing!

A small piece of feedback: it is a really interesting article, but also quite grating to read. I'm guessing you used AI to review/edit, and it seems to have added a lot of filler and coated the piece with its own writing style.

I found a pre-AI post much more pleasant to read: https://adfr.io/thoughts/20240207_time_travel

Quick question: Did you use AI for that post?

It was extremely informative; I didn't even know these things existed. It opens up several interesting alternatives for teaching kids.

Looking directly through? Or taking photos through?

With photos you can have a longer exposure and see things too faint for the naked eye, not just too small. I'd guess that's what's happening here. You could very probably blow this smart cam out of the water with pictures taken through your telescope. Especially if you can have it track whatever you're shooting to allow very long exposures

The main problem here is - purely visual, you will have a very hard time seeing galaxies and pretty much no chance of seeing nebulae, specially in color. The objects are pretty faint and at best, you will see a milky smush. Those nebulae I capture send out light in wavelengths not visible to the human eye, so you'll have no chance of seeing them live.

There are some night-vision eyepieces which boost contrast and lightness - really cool but also pretty expansive.

> am I getting a more "genuine" viewing experiencing? That's a nearly philosophical question and the answer is yes and no. You will be able to see object you normally would not and the image you get is correct in the way that colors for example represent certain gases, so they are not fake, but also not realistic in the way of how you would see it with your naked eye.

That is why I gravitated to astrophotography. Truth is that with visual viewing there just isn't that much that can be seen. With photography, even with basic equipment, it's a different game.

Take the Orion Nebula as an example. Visually I can't see anything there. But even a short (~30 second) exposure in a single frame (no stacking, or darks, or any fancy technique) brings on a stunning image.

Unfortunately your eyes cannot integrate light for 10 or 20 seconds. The pictures you see are stacking several pictures, each several seconds long. Then there is the astrophotography processing with darks, offsets and flatfields. And to finish some classical photoshop-like processing to make the contrast and the colors pop

I plan on grinding my own. That seems like it can be cheap too.

Absolutely, and I highly recommend starting that way. The comparison was meant against building up a photography rig with similar capabilities. Even with used components, it's gonna be hard to get into this price range.

When I bought my telescope, there was a dedicated physical brick&mortar store with knowledgeable people on staff. I had done a little browsing online to get an idea, but it was the staff that really sold me. The very first question I was asked on what I primarily wanted to view with the telescope: solar system bodies or deep sky objects. I chose wide field for DSOs. Sadly, that store closed about a year after my purchase.

Saying all that to expand on how the wide field or not is an important decision. If you primarily think of a telescope giving detailed magnified views of the moon or similar, then you will not be happy with a wide field regardless of how powerful of an eyepiece you use.

Yup, exactly what I noticed. And I do think the content is really cool but the writing, the section titles, the entire site design, it all reminds me of ai :(

Not to say anything negative about the author though, im sure this took a long time to put together whether it was written with ai or not. But I definitely noticed those ai-isms

Perhaps it's better to ponder whether or not it contains information useful to you / is a pleasure to read?

I’m more exhausted at hearing about how sick of LLM writing people are. Just don’t read it, save everyone time.

There tend to be two kinds of people, those who value the journey and those who value the product. This telescope is aimed more at those who value the product, and hand tool woodworking is probably more for those who value the journey. You would want a telescope that lets you value the journey

I'm not really disagreeing but people who grind their own mirrors might have the same feeling about people who buy a conventional telescope.