Seestar S30 Pro Review & Tutorial

In this in-depth review, I share my real-world experience with the new Seestar S30 Pro smart telescope from ZWO, based on two cold winter nights of testing under light-polluted urban skies. I cover everything from unboxing and specifications to solar, lunar, and deep-sky imaging, and explore whether the S30 Pro is a worthwhile upgrade over the Seestar S30 and S50. With its improved quadruplet apochromatic optics, upgraded IMX585 Sony sensor, EQ mode support, mosaic imaging, and intuitive app features, I explain why the Seestar S30 Pro stands out as one of the most capable, portable, and affordable smart telescopes available today.

Watch my YouTube video

After the success of the Seestar S50 and S30, ZWO was kind enough to send me their brand-new Seestar S30 Pro. In this blog, I’ll share my real-life experiences across two cold winter nights and we’ll take a close look at the specifications of this new smart telescope to see whether it’s worth considering as an upgrade to the older models, or as a new purchase.

Unboxing / Specs

The S30 Pro comes in a sturdy carrying bag with a sholder strap and includes a small tripod, a USB-C cable, and a solar filter, so you can safely image the Sun. The outside is almost identical to the S30, but it’s the inside that counts so let us take a look at the technical specs.

Unboxing the Seestar S30 Pro

At its core is a 30-millimeter aperture, 160-millimeter focal length f/5.3 quadruplet apochromatic telescope, designed to deliver excellent color correction and round stars across the full field of view. This is an upgrade from the earlier triplet refractor designs on the S30 and S50. For imaging, The S30 Pro has the popular 8-megapixel Sony IMX585 color sensor, which is a clear upgrade over the 2 megapixel IMX462 and 662 sensors in the S50 and S30.

Seestar S30 Pro

The S30 Pro delivers a field of view of 2.24 by 3.99 degrees in portrait mode, making it well suited for large nebulae and wide-field deep-sky objects. The resulting image scale is 3.74 arcseconds per pixel, which means you sacrifice some fine detail compared to larger aperture and longer focal length telescopes, but you’ll gain a wider view of the night sky.

In addition, the S30 Pro includes a higher quality wide-field IMX586 sensor, offering a large 63-degree field of view, which is great for widefield Milky Way and star trail photography, both of which are now offered as new options in the Seestar APP which you can download on any iOS or Android smart…