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Ranking The Best from 15+ Smart Telescopes

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Smart telescopes from DwarfLab, Vaonis and ZWO.
Smart telescopes from DwarfLab, Vaonis and ZWO. Image by Zane Landers

Smart telescopes are one of the newest and most exciting developments in amateur astronomy, one I have been following since their inception.

They are essentially miniaturized astrophotography rigs with the work done for you—the camera, focusing, and even much of the processing are built into these instruments and their accompanying apps. 

Setting up a smart telescope is dead simple—put it down, level the tripod, and initialize the app, and the telescope automatically aligns itself with the sky; after a few minutes you can choose your target at the push of a button. From there, the telescope takes many individual exposures—usually 10-30 seconds—and stacks them into a final photo. You can view an automatically-processed image of your target live on your smartphone/tablet as soon as enough exposures are accumulated, or you can collect hours of data—even over multiple nights—and edit the image yourself for a truly magnificent photo.

M8 with Dwarf Mini smart telescope
With Dwarf Mini
M8 with SeeStar S30 Pro Smart Telescope
With SeeStar S30 Pro
M8 with Vespera II smart telescope
With Vespera II
Lagoon Nebula (M8 ) with three smart telescopes: Dwarf Mini (1h 40m), SeeStar S30 Pro (1h 40m), Vespera II (5h 45m). Images taken by Zane Landers

Smart telescopes are meant exclusively for imaging deep-sky objects and other targets that require long exposures.

Unlike a traditional astrophotography rig that can take hours to set up and where even a single cable, software process, or alignment mishap can ruin your session, smart telescopes are typically simple, lightweight, and resilient.

With the exception of the massive Celestron Origin and the atypically large Spectrum Skypilot 127, all of the smart telescopes currently on the market are barely bigger than a gallon jug of milk and can be set up and imaging within about five minutes. If there’s a problem, you can simply reboot the whole thing and start over.

And all of these telescopes automatically reject frames if there are sudden clouds or a nearby light washing out the view.

All smart telescopes are, by default, alt-azimuth mounted. An alt-azimuth mount suffers from what is known as field rotation—individual exposures have to be limited to 30 seconds or less to avoid blurring. What’s more is that due to the stair-step motion a telescope on an alt-azimuth mount makes, the software has to either crop the frame, pan around in a mosaic, or simply end up with ragged and noisy edges due to the field rotation.

The ZWO SeeStar, Dwarf, and Celestron Origin models all offer the ability to be tilted on a wedge and track in an equatorial configuration for longer exposures and to eliminate the problems of field rotation, but the tracking is still not as accurate as what you’d get out of a true equatorial mount.

They are a poor choice for most Solar System objects, unless the type of Solar System objects you’re interested in happen to be faint and distant asteroids or Kuiper Belt objects.

A high-quality visual telescope is really just an entirely different experience than a smart telescope. Even a pair of binoculars will give a more exciting and close-up view of the Moon or planets than any smart telescope can offer.

Smart telescopes are arguably best when used alongside a visual instrument, imaging targets in the background for you to process and admire the following day while you explore the night sky with your eyeballs. I have never been particularly excited by viewing the live stacked images on my device anyway.

These are limitations, to be sure, but smart telescopes can take some fantastic photos if you learn how to work around their constraints.

Until recently, many of these products were more or less prototypes, but in 2025, manufacturers finally started getting the hang of the software side of smart telescopes. Today, there are numerous high-quality offerings from Dwarflab, ZWO, Celestron, Vaonis, and Spectrum Optics, with new entrants surely to come. I am very enthusiastic about these telescopes and their appeal to an entirely new generation of hobbyists, but it’s worth noting that they cannot do all of the things that an ordinary telescope with an eyepiece can do.

So far, I’ve owned and spent months using the Dwarf II, Dwarf Mini, ZWO SeeStar S50, ZWO SeeStar S30 Pro, and Vaonis Vespera II smart telescopes and spent extensive time with all of the other smart telescopes here in our rankings.

There are 5 sensors predominantly used with smart telescopes, all manufactured by Sony.

The IMX662 is essentially a cropped version of the IMX585 sensor, with the same performance and pixel size but a smaller total view, while the IMX462 is basically just an older, lower-quality IMX662.

SensorResolutionPixel SizeQuantum Efficiency
IMX4621936 × 1096 (2.1 MP)2.9 μm80%
IMX6621936 × 1100 (2.1 MP)2.9 μm91%
IMX5853840 × 2160 (8.29 MP)2.9 μm91%
IMX6763552 × 3552 (12.6 MP)2.0 μm83%
IMX6783840 × 2160 (8.29 MP)2.0 μm83%
ScopeIMX662IMX585IMX678IMX676IMX415
Dwarf Mini*
Dwarf 3*
SeeStar S30*
SeeStar S30 Pro*
SeeStar S50*
Origin 2*
SkyPilot 53*
SkyPilot 127*
Vespera II*
Vespera Pro*

Different smart telescopes have different-sized objectives. Most sold today are 50mm in aperture or less, enabling the use of standard astronomical filters on the front in many cases, and are photographically fast, typically f/5 or below.

However, the FOV is ultimately determined by the sensor used.

ScopeAperture (mm)Focal Length (mm)FOVImage Scale (arcsec/pixel)
Dwarf Mini301502.46°4
Dwarf 3351502.93° × 1.65°2.75
SeeStar S30301502.46°4
SeeStar S30 Pro301504.6°4
SeeStar S50502501.29° × 0.73°2.4
Origin 21523351.32° × 0.75°1.23
SkyPilot 53532231.6° × 0.9°2.7
SkyPilot 12753 (piggybacked on 127mm)2231.6° × 0.9° (53mm)2.7
Vespera II502502.5° × 1.4°2.4
Vespera Pro502501.6° × 1.6°1.6
Jump To Our Picks:

Best Value; #1 Pick

Runner-Up; #2 Pick

Category: Less than $500 Smart Telescopes

It’s hard enough to find a decent regular telescope under $500, and it’s seriously impressive that there are quality smart telescopes at this price. The Dwarf Mini and SeeStar S30 have identical optics and sensors, but the Dwarf Mini wins out on account of having slightly better features—there's a wide-angle secondary lens, video mode, and the software is more reliable, leading to fewer dropped frames.
DwarfLab dwarf mini Smart Telescope
DwarfLab Dwarf Mini
$399 at DwarfLab
The Dwarf Mini is an extremely compact "smart telescope" capable of both astrophotography and terrestrial shots. Unlike competitors, it offers some unique features, such as a built-in nebula filter, and exposures up to 180 seconds are possible. However, the IMX662 sensor is somewhat small compared to the field of view offered by most competitors.
ZWO SeeStar S30
Rank 2
4.7/5
ZWO's budget smart telescope, the SeeStar S30, is nice but doesn't offer a whole lot in the way of performance. The S30 Pro has a much better sensor, and we'd recommend spending a bit more to get that instead. Lately, S30 is also hard to find in the United States with the introduction of S30 Pro.
Spectrum Optical Instruments EduSnap Astro 53 Pro Smart Telescope
Rank 3
3.6/5
The Spectrum Optics EduSnap Astro 53 sounds nice on paper, but its mount is not nearly as well-made as that of other smart telescopes, and the ability to look through an eyepiece isn't very interesting with such a small instrument unless you have access to very dark skies.
Vaonis Hestia Smartphone Telescope
Rank 4
3/5

Category: $500 - $1000 Smart Telescopes

The new ZWO SeeStar S30 Pro couples a top-of-the-line IMX585 sensor with sharp 30mm f/5.3 apochromatic optics and a quality wide-angle lens – essentially a better version of the Dwarf Mini’s hardware. It’s capable of taking stunning images of nebulae and other deep-sky targets, and the wide-angle lens is downright impressive when it comes to time lapses of the Milky Way, star trails, and even for taking normal videos in daylight.
Seestar S30 Pro Smart Telescope
My #1 Pick: The Best
ZWO SeeStar S30 Pro
$599 at ZWO
ZWO's newest smart telescope, featuring a high-quality IMX585 sensor for stunning deep-sky images. We're looking forward to a 50mm version that competes with Vaonis Vespera II sometime in the future, but for now, the SeeStar S30 Pro is an excellent introduction to deep-sky astrophotography with a fraction of the budget or expertise required compared to a traditional setup.
ZWO Seestar S50 All-in-One Smart Telescope
ZWO SeeStar S50
$549 at ZWO
ZWO's original smart telescope, the SeeStar S50, has a rather low-resolution sensor but can produce recognizable images of deep-sky objects within just a few minutes of exposure time. However, there's nothing like looking through the eyepiece of a quality telescope, especially at the Moon or planets, and for serious imaging capabilities, the SeeStar S30 Pro features a vastly superior IMX585 sensor. S50 is also being discontinued in the United States.
DwarfLab DWARF 3
Rank 3
4.4/5

The Dwarf 3 offers a wide field of view, the ability to be used in an equatorial configuration, and some interesting terrestrial capabilities – but for the price, the ZWO SeeStar S30 has much better performance for astrophotography purposes and offers the same dual-lens capabilities too.

Spectrum Optical Instruments SkyPilot 53 Smart Telescope
Rank 4
3.5/5

Category: $1000 – $2500 Smart Telescopes

The main option in this price range is the Vaonis Vespera II. While unable to track in an equatorial configuration like most of its competitors, the Vespera II offers the superb IMX585 sensor combined with quadruplet 50mm f/5 optics and a seriously impressive software package, with onboard pre-processing that works much better than other smart telescope apps’ and features like mosaic mode. There are also the Unistellar eVscope models, which we don’t recommend on account of their mediocre performance and overpromised features such as exoplanet transit photometry (the eVscope’s data is simply too noisy to actually be used for quality science, and these observations are usually discarded by the institutions they are sent to).
Vaonis Vespera II Smart Telescope
Runner-Up; My #2 Pick
Vaonis Vespera II
$1590 at High Point
Vaonis’ Vespera II is essentially an all-in-one telephoto lens astrophotography rig, based on a 50mm apochromatic refractor. The scope is jaw-droppingly convenient, and the images it delivers are pretty nice, with the ability to do your own processing as well as view them “live”. There’s even a built-in mosaic mode, and it’s vastly easier to learn to use Vespera than a traditional astrophotography setup. However, if you want to actually look through a telescope, this isn’t for you.
Spectrum Optical Instruments SkyPilot 127 Smart Telescope
Rank 2
4.3/5

A somewhat unusual 5″ GoTo Maksutov with app-based control and an apochromatic finder scope, the SkyPilot 127 is a significantly more modern take on the idea of GoTo telescopes. You can use it for some astrophotography and live stacking like a “smart telescope” with the included camera too, but for purely deep-sky imaging the ZWO SeeStar S50 or S30 Pro probably makes more sense.

Unistellar eVscope 2 eQuinox
Rank 3
3.6/5

The eVscope EQUINOX does what it says – or at least, what it says beneath the marketing fluff. You’re getting a few hundred bucks worth of 114mm telescope, a cheap uncooled camera, and a low-quality mount in a package that delivers garbage “live” poorly processed images that would make a real astrophotographer laugh at you, and with views largely inferior to a moderate-sized Dobsonian under even light-polluted skies. Don’t believe the hype.

Unistellar eVscope 2 Odyssey
Rank 4
3.5/5
The evScope 2 Odyssey is more or less the same as the eQuinox but with smaller 85mm optics. Not recommended – the ZWO SeeStar and Vaonis Vespera models all deliver better performance at lower price tags.

Category: $2500+ Smart Telescopes

At this price range, if you want the highest-quality photos, it probably makes more sense to just put together your own astrophotography rig with a true equatorial mount, a cooled camera sensor, and autoguiding. However, the Celestron Origin 2 comes pretty close with its f/2.2 RASA optics and high-quality IMX678 Starvis 2 sensor, while the Vaonis Vespera Pro also delivers super-sharp images (at the expense of a much smaller FOV than the Vespera II).
Celestron Origin Mark II Smart Telescope
Celestron Origin Mk2
$4299 at High Point
The Celestron Origin is a real imaging setup based on Celestron’s 6″ RASA astrograph, with all of the fuss of deep-sky astrophotography sorted out for you (though the best results come from doing your own processing). If you’re interested in a convenient and lightweight setup for quick imaging, however, you might want to consider a smaller scope from Vaonis or ZWO, and for serious astrophotography, there are better camera sensors than the one supplied with the Origin.
Vaonis Vespera Pro Smart Telescope
Vaonis Vespera Pro
$2490 at High Point
Vaonis’ Vespera Pro has a smaller sensor with smaller pixels than the Vespera II, delivering slightly crisper images at the expense of longer exposure times and a somewhat cropped field of view. For some objects, this is an upgrade, and the Pro also features most of the optional upgrades available to the II by default.
Unistellar eVscope 2
Rank 2
3.4/5

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