DwarfLab DWARF 3 Smart Telescope

Very small optics, so this is not a light bucket. It works by stacking many short exposures rather than gathering a lot of light at once, which means bright nebulae and large clusters come out well while faint small galaxies stay out of reach.

The 150 mm lens gives a wide field that suits large nebulae, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way, and the second wide lens covers landscape and eclipse-style scenes. Two focal lengths in one body is unusual in this class and makes it more of a general astro camera than a telescope.

Fast optics keep sub-exposures short, which is what allows usable images to build within minutes on a lightweight mount. Speed is doing the work here that aperture does in a conventional telescope.

There is no eyepiece and nothing to collimate. You watch the image build on your phone as the onboard computer stacks frames, so the experience is closer to using a camera app than to observing at a telescope.

Under 3 lb including the mount, so it fits in a small bag with a travel tripod. This is the size that makes a dark-sky trip a matter of packing rather than planning.

The mount, camera and processing are one sealed unit that plate-solves and tracks by itself, so setup is a few taps. Alt-azimuth tracking and short exposures mean it stacks many brief frames rather than taking long ones.