First Light of Smart Telescope

People ask, "What kind of a telescope should I get?" I don't have my fingers on the pulse of new telescope design and technology, so I defer to others with more experience. Lately they have steered me to smart telescopes, which connects directly to a cell phone app for digital imaging instead of visual observing through an eyepiece. Less expensive smart scopes reviewed by Space.com might be my recommendation for newcomers to telescopes in a light polluted world.

Unsurprisingly, I reserved the honor of First Light--the first view in a new telescope--for the variable star T Coronae Borealis (T CrB), which is a 10th magnitude star about to explode as a recurring nova. When it eventually erupts, T CrB will likely appear as a 2nd magnitude star visible to the naked eye. I now have a baseline image to compare the before and after views.

Here's how T CrB looks as of February 8, 2026, using a Seestar S50 with a three-minute exposure.

First Light: 3-minute exposure of T CrB using Seestar S50 telescope.

I added two red lines to help correlate the AAVSO comparison star chart with the First Light image, and I put magnitudes (without the decimal points) near comparison stars excerpted from the star chart. I find it's easiest to isolate T CrB by finding the multiple pairs of stars in a row along the bottom and then star hop from there.

Left: Seestar S50 image with comparison stars' magnitudes (without decimal points) in red. Right: AAVSO comparison star chart. Two red lines help with orientation.

For a second Seestar image I went after a bright showstopper, the Orion Nebula (M42). Because the nebula's angular size is large, I had to use the Seestar's mosaic feature to stack images larger than a single field of view. When I hit Go on the Seestar, it starts taking 10-second images. After only one image the nebula is centered and apparent, but the ensuing 35 minutes worth of images combined brighten the subject and improve the resolution.

With that impressive resulting image, Seestar takes care of dark fields and hot pixels and "denoising" so the user doesn't have to do post-processing, though that optional work exists for those who seek to manipulate the raw images themselves. I chose quick satisfaction. What would normally appear as a blob in my 8-inch reflector telescope instead is a lovely full-color spectacle worthy of framing. And that was only my second try.

I'm eager to get more images of the winter sky with a new smart scope in ensuing nights. Meanwhile, around 3.30 a.m. a cell phone camera reveals the constellation Crux, better known as Southern Cross, standing upright on the southern horizon over the Gulf of Mexico when viewed from southwest Florida. You don't always need a smart telescope for rewarding digital images at night; oftentimes, cell-estial photos satisfy the quest.

The constellation Crux, a.k.a Southern Cross, stands upright at 3:15 a.m. on Feb. 8, 2026; photographed with an iPhone from southern Florida with a 10-second exposure.