Your ultimate guide to the best new smart telescopes

2. Pros and cons of smart telescopes

What’s so good about smart telescopes?

The best thing about smart telescopes for anyone that lives in a city is that they remove the effect of light pollution. Stargazers and amateur astronomers living in cities find it increasingly difficult to see any deep sky objects – such as galaxies, nebula and star clusters – because of sky glow created by artificial light. 

Smart telescopes are periodically updated with new firmware that adds new features, which makes them the world’s only telescopes that can be upgraded even many years after they were purchased.

Is a smart telescope for you?

Smart telescopes can easily be used by anyone familiar with smartphone apps, but they’re particularly well-suited to people who: 

• live in a city under light-polluted skies and can’t see many stars
• want to take spectacular color images of galaxies, nebula and more with minimum effort then share them on social media
• hate the thought of aligning and setting up a telescope
• don’t want to stay outside for hours in the cold fiddling with a telescope

Smart vs computerized vs motorized telescopes

Although the term “smart telescope” is used to describe this new category of telescope, it’s perhaps better to think of them as digital telescopes. A smart telescope has an onboard computer and a mount that includes a motor. It autonomously aligns with the night sky and automatically slews to any object you choose from a catalog in a smartphone app. 

Don’t confuse a smart telescope with a computerized or a motorized telescope. If a telescope is described purely as computerized or motorized then it’s simply an old-fashioned optical telescope with an eyepiece that you have to look through to see objects in the night sky. These GoTo telescopes often have computers and motors, but they are not smart telescopes because they do not integrate with smartphones and they do not produce images of the night sky. All they really do is slew to objects selected from a database using a wired handset. Hardly cutting edge!

Expert tip: Smart telescopes produce images in near-HD quality that can be instantly shared on social media and messaging apps complete with captions and pre-formatted sizes. This image of the Orion Nebula (M42) was taken using a Unistellar eVscope eQuinox 2.

Credit: Unistellar/SmartTelescopeReviews.com

3. Buying a smart telescope

What companies make smart telescopes? 

The two main companies that produce smart telescopes are Unistellar and Vaonis. Both are based in Marseille, France. A challenger brand from China called DwarfLabs became the third smart telescope producer in 2022. However, traditional telescope maker Celestron also sells its StarSense Explorer products that use a smartphone app for finding objects, so can only loosely be defined as ‘smart’. 

What is the best smart telescope? 

The best smart telescope for you would depend on your budget and your exact needs, but as a general rule, the two flagship smart telescopes available – both of which are hugely expensive – are the Unistellar eVscope 2 the Vaonis Stellina. Thankfully, both brands make more affordable versions, the Unistellar eVscope eQuinox 2 and the Vaonis Vespera. 

How many smart telescopes are there?

There are seven smart telescopes on sale, some of which are upgrades of earlier models that are still available: 

• Unistellar eVscope (first sold in 2020) 
• Unistellar eVscope 2 (first sold in 2022)
• Unistellar eVscope eQuinox (first sold in 2021)
• Unistellar eVscope eQuinox 2 (first sold in 2023)
• Vaonis Stellina (first sold in 2020)
• Vaonis Vespera (first sold in 2022)
• Dwarflabs Dwarf II (first sold in 2023)

What size and type of telescopes are smart telescopes?

Although smart telescopes are very different to purely optical telescopes in the way they work, at their core they’re still optical telescopes. There are three main optical designs of telescope – refractor, reflector and catadioptric – two of which are represented in smart telescopes: 

• Unistellar eVscope: 4.5-inch/114mm reflector
• Unistellar eVscope 2: 4.5-inch/114mm reflector
• Unistellar eVscope eQuinox: 4.5-inch/114mm reflector
• Unistellar eVscope eQuinox 2: 4.5-inch/114mm reflector
• Vaonis Stellina: 3.15-inch refractor/80mm refractor
• Vaonis Vespera: 2-inch refractor/50mm refractor
• Dwarflabs Dwarf II: 1-inch/24mm periscope

What makes one smart telescope better than another? 

What sets apart one smart telescope from another is the user experience and the smartphone app that controls it, but most of all it’s down to the algorithms and image sensors used to create the images. When you see a new smart telescope newly launched by Unistellar or Vaonis it will typically include the latest and greatest example of Sony’s high-performance IMX-Series CMOS camera sensors. It’s largely a matter of megapixels, with the latest CMOS sensors promising more detail, but also increased contrast and less ISO image noise. However, don’t obsess about the sensor because each smart telescope is different in terms of its field of view.

Do Celestron and Meade make smart telescopes? 

Celestron and Meade are two of the biggest brands in optical telescopes for amateur astronomers, but neither brand produces smart telescopes. However, Celestron does have a category of telescope marketed StarSense Explorer that do involve a very clever smartphone app. 

What are Celestron StarSense Explorer telescopes?

Introduced in 2020, these telescopes come with a smartphone mount on the side of the optical tube. That amount includes a mirror, which, when used in conjunction with a smartphone’s camera, allows an app to align the telescope automatically with the night sky. The app then acts as a guide, showing the user where to manually point their telescope to have an object in the center of its field of view. The StarSense Explorer app is like having a sat-nav for your telescope.

StarSense Explorer is a very smart concept and the telescopes that use it are hugely enjoyable to use, though, since the current technology is available on a range of different telescopes at different price points, the quality hugely varies. 

Celestron’s StarSense Explorer telescopes can’t be described purely as smart telescopes because they do not take images of the night sky, but since they are something of a hybrid product we do include short reviews of them on this website. 

Celestron makes eight StarSense Explorer telescopes:

• StarSense Explorer 8-inch/203mm Dobsonian telescope
• StarSense Explorer 10-inch/254mm Dobsonian telescope
• StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ 5.1-inch/130mm Newtonian reflector telescope 
• StarSense Explorer DX 102AZ 4-inch/102mm refractor telescope 
• StarSense Explorer LT 114AZ 4.5-inch/114mm Newtonian reflector telescope 
• StarSense Explorer LT 80AZ 3.1-inch/80mm refractor telescope 
• Popular Science by Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 100AZ 4-inch/100mm refractor telescope 
• Popular Science by Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 5-inch/127mm Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope

5. Astrophotography with a smart telescope

Don’t smart telescopes just show you space photos from the internet?

Are smart telescopes an expensive fraud? Are they merely pretending to do something clever and then just downloading images from Hubble or JWST and showing you them on your smartphone? Of course not! It’s understandable to be skeptical about new technology – especially in an age of fake news and deepfake videos – but all smart telescopes are doing is what professional telescopes have been doing for decades. And the science of astronomy is doing just fine without eyepieces! You can actually watch a smart telescope’s in-app image improve every five seconds as each new image is stacked on top of the last one and, with a slight wiggle, digitally aligned. This is real-time astronomy – just like JWST, but completely automated. 

How good are the images from a smart telescope?

The images that come from a smart telescope differ, according to which model you use, but generally speaking, they are high on contrast and color and relatively low on sharpness. Some dedicated astrophotographers are vocally critical of smart telescopes, perhaps because they remove all the hassle and complexity astrophotographers have spent many years mastering. You may not win any astrophotography competitions, but the images you create using a smart telescope will – for most people – be far better than anything you could achieve with your own set-up … and with zero hassle or post-processing. As an all-in-one astrophotography tool for those of us for whom our time is too valuable to waste on dull and time-consuming tasks, a smart telescope is impossible to beat. 

Can smart telescopes image galaxies, nebulae, globular clusters and star clusters? 

Yes. In fact, smart telescopes are designed primarily to image deep sky objects, such as distant galaxies, faint nebulae, globular clusters and open clusters of stars. It’s precisely these kinds of objects that are very difficult to see if you live in an area with high light pollution, such as all cities and most towns in the world. Consequently, if you use an optical telescope, you’re going to struggle to see anything, except for the moon and planets from most locations. A smart telescope essentially fills the gap by adding deep sky visibility to an amateur astronomer’s repertoire. So, arguably, the keen amateur astronomer should have both an optical telescope and a smart telescope.

Can smart telescopes image planets? 

As of 2023, smart telescopes can image planets. Thanks to a firmware update to all of its smart telescopes both old and new, Unistellar’s entire eVscope range of products now has a dedicated ‘planet mode’. The trouble with taking images of planets is that they are extremely bright, relative to everything else in the night sky, and they’re so close that clear views of them are easily interrupted by unstable conditions in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Unistellar uses a tried-and-tested astrophotography technique called ‘lucky imaging’, which means lots of short exposures are taken in the hope that some images are taken in the split second that the atmosphere settles momentarily. It works reasonably well, but expect souvenir images rather than incredibly detailed close-ups.

Can smart telescopes image double stars?

Although it’s very tempting to point a smart telescope at distant galaxies and colorful nebula, smart telescopes are very good at revealing double stars. There are many examples in the night sky, many of which a smart telescope can produce an excellent image of, such as: 

• Albireo in Cygnus
• Almach in Andromeda
• Mizar and Alcor in Ursa Major
• Epsilon Lyrae in Lyra (the so-called ‘Double-Double’)
• Theta Tauri in Taurus

Can smart telescopes image the Moon?

At the time of writing, no smart telescope has a specialized ‘Moon mode’. However, it looks likely that one will be introduced during 2023 or 2024. That’s because all of the latest smart telescopes now have a slightly wider field of view around the same angular size as the moon. Future firmware updates will probably make this a standard feature on all smart telescopes.

Can smart telescopes image comets? 

Smart telescopes are very effective at capturing comets. The very nature of these icy visitors from the edge of the solar system is that they are visible for only a short time and move quickly against the background of stars. However, since the apps that control smart telescopes are frequently updated, the coordinates and orbit of comets are usually available, so they can be imaged fairly easily.

Can smart telescopes be used for science? 

In conjunction with scientists at NASA and SETI, Unistellar’s eVscope smart telescopes are increasingly being used for crowdsourcing astronomical observations around the clock from around the world. One notable example is the confirmation of NASA’s DART planetary defense mission, where over thirty eVscope users worldwide observed the impact of DART on asteroid Dimorphos and its subsequent behavior. These observations were crowdsourced from the telescopes, and the users were credited as co-authors in a Nature journal article published in March 2023. The new Unistellar app for smartphones now focuses on scientific observations and allows users to attempt to capture an asteroid occultation, confirm exoplanet transits spotted by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and observe passing comets. The app takes users to Unistellar’s website, which finds specific events or targets, provides the observation time, and transfers the coordinates back into the smart telescope. Vaonis smart telescopes do not have this dimension.

• The Unistellar Exoplanet Campaign: Citizen Science Results and Inherent Education Opportunities
• Unistellar Citizen Science Network and SETI Institute Contribute to Planetary Defense

7. Smart telescopes: the future

Will smart telescopes replace old manual telescopes? 

Smart telescopes are best thought of as an exciting new tool for amateur astronomy. Some amateur astronomers think the lack of an eyepiece on smart telescopes is a problem because the photons from distant objects are not hitting their retinas. Instead, you see only a digital image. However, this is how professional astronomers have been observing for many decades, and it’s also how the likes of JWST and Hubble work, as well as all robotic telescopes on mountaintops around the world. However, smart telescopes are not particularly good at imaging, planets or the Moon, something small backyard telescopes can excel at. So if you want the best of both worlds, get an optical telescope to complement your smart telescope.

The citizen science telescope network

Over 10,000 people now have a smart telescope, which means there’s an ever-increasing network of these products making observations while being connected to the Internet. Now citizen science campaigns are being offered by the makers of smart telescopes it now seems likely that scientists will soon be able to access data on the night sky that was previously impossible.

For example, have you heard about the exoplanets being discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)? It’s so incredibly busy that it only has time to make quick observations of stars to see if there are planets in orbit around them. It doesn’t have time to confirm its findings and, consequently, there’s a huge demand for telescope time in professional observatories on Earth for follow-up observations to confirm transiting exoplanets. New campaigns in the Unistellar app allow users to point their smart telescopes at these candidate planets to see if they really exist. What’s more, several smart telescopes at different locations around the world can be used to create a 24/7 observation campaign. So, if an alien planet passes in front of its star once every 32 hours, one of the smart telescopes pointed at it will find it. This kind of always-on astronomy will likely lead to many discoveries by amateur and professional astronomers. 

It’s exactly this kind of citizen science that makes smart telescopes such a fascinating development for the future of astronomy.

The age of the smart telescope has arrived – and we’re all invited!