NEW! Seestar S30 Plus Review – Best Budget Smart Telescope?

The budget smart telescope market is getting crowded. After the Seestar S50 and S30, ZWO developed two “Pro” versions with the Seestar S30 Pro and S50 Pro. While everyone was awaiting a rumored Seestar S70, ZWO did something unexpected and released the NEW affordable Seestar S30 PLUS (~ $499). Is this the new best budget telescope on the market? Let’s find out…

Unboxing and Technical Specifications

My Seestar S30 plus arrived with a nice strap-on bag, a small tripod, a magnetic solar filter and a usb-c cable

Unboxing the S30 Plus

The Seestar S30 Plus features a 4-element apochromatic refractor telescope with a 30mm aperture, a 160mm focal length, at a fast f/5.3 focal ratio.

Incoming light from the refractor is captured in 2K resolution at 1440 by 2560 pixels with a SmartSens (SC485SL) camera sensor. SmartSens is a global security camera manufacturer and its cameras are known for their exceptional low-light and dynamic CMOS sensors. This combination gives you a 3-degree diagonal field of view of the night sky—that’s about 6 times the full moon —at an image scale of 3.74 arcseconds per pixel.

Field of view S30 Plus

A second Sony IMX586 camera sensor serves as a wide-field lens providing a sweeping 43.5-degree view in 2K portrait mode. It’s fantastic for daytime photos and videos, Milky Way and star-trail photography, and acts as a wide-angle finder to effortlessly line up targets before switching to the telephoto lens.

The S30 Plus includes four astrophotography filters: a built-in UV/IR cut filter for standard day and night video and photography, a built-in dual-band Ha/OIII light pollution filter to block urban light pollution and capture light from emission nebulae, a built-in dark filter for taking dark calibration frames to eliminate camera noise, and a clip-on magnetic solar filter for safely capturing the sun.

Like it’s S30 predecessors, the S30 plus weighs just 1.65 kilograms at 21 by 14 by 8 centimeters, so it slides easily into a backpack when you plan on traveling to dark skies. It packs 64GB of internal storage—leaving roughly 44GB of free space after system files— which is plenty of space to store your MP4 or AVI RAW videos, and JPEG or FITS images. The S30 Plus is powered by a built-in battery that lasts up to 6 hours, and it can also be easily hooked up to an external power bank with a usb-c cable for all-night imaging sessions.

Testing the S30 Plus in alt-az mode on the included mini tripod

I first selected Scenery mode in the…