 I have three different kits for astrophotography here and each kit can be bought for under 500 US dollars. Tonight, I'm putting these head to head and they're gonna be shooting two beautiful deep sky objects, the Pleiades Star Cluster and the Orion Nebula. The contenders for this showdown are the Dwarf II Smart Telescope, the ZWO C-Star S50, and finally a kit made up of a used Canon T7 DSLR, a used Canon Zoom lens, a used Bogan tripod, and a 3D printed OG Star Tracker. Welcome, my name is Nico and this channel is all about helping people explore the wonderful hobby called astrophotography, which just means photographing the night sky. And I specialize in deep sky astrophotography, meaning capturing objects like nebulae, star clusters, and even other galaxies, basically anything that's outside of our solar system. And since this is a review, a comparison review, I have a few quick disclosures up front here. The Dwarf was sent to me by Dwarf Labs, the C-Star by ZWO, and the 3D printed parts and electronics to put this Star Tracker together were sent to me by OG StarTech. And with all of these products, no money is exchanged hands, I get to say whatever I want, but I wanna thank OG StarTech, ZWO, and Dwarf Labs for a chance to review these here on the YouTube channel. Okay, so the first kit here is the Dwarf II. The Dwarf is a smart telescope, meaning it has all of the typical parts that go into a full astrophotography rig, like a tracking mount, a camera, an electronic focuser, a telescope, all these things, built into one little compact device that's self-contained. And you control it from an app on your phone or your tablet. The Dwarf is available in different packages, but the classic one is $460 at the moment. And it comes with the Dwarf II itself, a microSD card, a single battery, a mini tripod, and a carrying case. There is a more deluxe package that's $600 that adds on an extra battery and a few filters, like a solar filter and an ultra high contrast filter, which can be useful for emission nebulae, especially when you have light pollution. I'm testing these telescopes, these setups, under a dark, rural sky, so there won't be an issue here with light pollution. And I'm only going to be using what comes with the classic kit when it comes to the Dwarf. So set up of the Dwarf, you charge the battery inside the unit, just with the USB-C cable, just like you were charging a phone. You then connect this mini tripod to the bottom here, and ideally you put it on a level and secure surface. If you can't find level ground, the tripod does have a ball head, which you can use for some basic leveling. This middle part flips up, so it starts closed like this, and you can just move it with your hand. And we immediately see an interesting feature here, a unique feature of the Dwarf, which is that it has both a wide angle and a telephoto camera system. And so this can be pretty cool for seeing the broader context of what you're shooting more zoomed in. And I especially like it during the daytime, and it's also useful for solar. I haven't found the wide angle super useful for deep skies, it's just a very dark view, so I'm not gonna focus on that in this video. When we turn the Dwarf on, we can then open up the app, the app's available for Android or iOS. I do realize that they're always updating these apps. I think the appearance of this one may be slightly different already, but the basic workflow is going to stay the same. We start by connecting to the Dwarf, which is a very smooth process. It starts by connecting over Bluetooth and then prompts you to connect to its Wi-Fi network. Once it's connected on its own Wi-Fi network, you then have complete control over the Dwarf telescope from this app. And the first time I'm using the telescope, I'm going to take dark frame calibrations, where you put the telescope lenses back down and you cover the whole thing up if there's any stray light out, and you let it take those dark frames and it takes a while. I have tried the telescope without using darks and can confirm that there are many hot pixels that are pretty distracting, and the dark frame calibration will eliminate those for the most part, so I think it's well worth taking the time to do it right away. And it stores those dark frames on the device, so you don't have to do it every time. Okay, with that done, you can calibrate the go-to on the telescope with this calibration option here. And go-to just means its ability to go to different objects in the night sky. And when you tap that calibration button, it will move around the sky to a few different spots and plate solve, meaning identifying where it's pointed based on the star patterns. And then after it's calibrated like that, it should be able to go to any object that's visible for you in your night sky at that time. So the first object of the night for us is the Pleiades, which I can see right up there. So we're gonna choose that from the list here, M45, and go-to it. Now, if I had instead picked Orion Nebula M42 first, it would have actually failed because Orion is blocked by trees where I'm standing. So while these telescopes are smart, they still can't see through trees. You do have to sort of know the night sky enough to pick things that are up. All right, so it found the Pleiades. To take pictures of it, we can go to the settings here, and I'm gonna do the IR cut filter, gain 100, auto white balance, and 10 second exposures. Just through some trial and error, I found that these are pretty safe settings to use for most bright deep sky objects with the dwarf. And then over here, we can tell it how many pictures to take, what format, and start it going. And like all of these smart telescopes that I've used, it does stack live on the device and then transmits that to your app. So you get to see the picture more clearly as it develops, and usually a half an hour is pretty good. But you can also take those individual pictures that it's stacking off the device and stack them yourself if you want to get a slightly better result. And I'll show all of this towards the end, but let's move on to the pros and cons of the dwarf. The pros to me are it's incredibly lightweight and compact, especially for all the features that they've built into it. It's pretty amazing how small and light this is. The wide angle plus telephoto capability can be a lot of fun, especially during the day. The go to ability, the ability to find things in the night sky is very fast and as long as you calibrate it successfully, it's also very accurate. Connecting to the dwarf has been smooth for me. I haven't had any connectivity issues with its Wi-Fi network that it creates. The cons are the autofocus routine is a little hit or miss for me. Sometimes it gets it correct and pretty fast. Other times it just seems to hang or not know what it's doing. And then manually setting the focus with the tapping is okay, but it also can be sort of annoying. The other con is the sensor and telescope are of course both quite small as I've been talking about as a very small unit. So the downside to that is you're gonna have fairly noisy images. Even if you do the 30 minutes of exposure, you'll see some grain in the darker parts of the sky. And this is more just a limitation of the aperture, the size of the telescope and the small sensor inside more than anything else. But overall, I've had a lot of fun with this. I like that they give you some control as the photographer over the shutter speed and the IR filter and so forth. So it still feels to me like controlling a camera in a way which I enjoy, but other people may not. And here are the pictures that I took with it. First of the Pleiades star cluster and here is the Ryan Nebula. And I'll talk more about these images when we get to the comparisons of the end, but these are edited by me on the computer. They aren't what you get straight on the phone, but I'll show more of that kind of stuff at the end of the video and final comparisons. The ZWO C-Star S50 is in some ways a very similar concept to the dwarf, but I would say the C-Star doesn't really feel like operating a camera in the same way that the dwarf does. ZWO has made everything so seamless and automatic that it's more like controlling this futuristic device that just lets you see the deep sky objects without any prior knowledge of photography or astronomy. And so I'd say it's a very similar experience in a lot of ways to the Veyonus Vespera that I reviewed a while back that's a more expensive smart telescope, but the C-Star S50 is selling for 499 US dollars at time of recording. And for that price, it comes with the C-Star S50 itself, a mini tripod, a solar filter, a USB-C charging cable and a carrying case. The first few setup steps are very similar to the dwarf. You charge it like a phone with a USB-C cable. You turn it on, you connect it over Bluetooth and then on its Wi-Fi network. One difference you'll notice is that the C-Star Telescope by default has a speaker. So it'll actually talk to you and give you sort of vocal prompts of what it's doing. You can turn that feature off if you want, but I left it on and I think it can be nice to have that feedback. Sometimes, you know, with the dwarf, I didn't know when something had finished, but the ZWO C-Star always sort of tells you. Like the dwarf and other smart telescopes, the telescope should be leveled for best results. And with the C-Star, if you're not leveled, it'll actually prompt you in the app to level it before you get going with photography, which is a really nice feature. I didn't find the little on-screen display super intuitive. I prefer the bubble level on the tripod, but it's still nice that it sort of tells you if you're level or not right in the app. After that, it's very automatic. You know, with the dwarf, there were a lot of little steps you had to learn about, you know, calibrating the go-to, taking dark frames. None of that really happens with the C-Star. You just say, I want to stargaze and off you go. It does have a good autofocus routine. You can use that if you think you're not in focus. And I found the autofocus is pretty reliable with the C-Star. And then once you start taking pictures, it's going to pick all the settings for you automatically. Now, one thing I did appreciate since the field of view is more zoomed in than it is with the dwarf, is that it's pretty easy to adjust your composition by just tapping here. And then it gives you a nice survey image and you can sort of adjust with the rectangle here to the new place that you want to point the telescope. You confirm it, it goes there, and then you're pointed at that part of the sky. So, but even with that ability to sort of change your pointing, I did find that the framing on this was often a little bit difficult because it's so zoomed in on some of these bigger deep sky objects. Well, the dwarf has a wider field of view due to a smaller telescope inside. So it's not as much of an issue to get the whole Orion Nebula in or the whole Pleiades star cluster. While with the C-Star, they were both cut off a little bit. But given that, it does produce beautiful striking images for a $500 telescope. I think the slightly larger aperture here is really helping with image quality and probably just also their, the way they're post-processing the images while they're stacking them, rejecting bad frames. All of these things really help the C-Star take beautiful images. And when it's done, when you hit you're done stacking, it does add a little bit of information with your location and object name at the bottom of the picture. In terms of pros and cons, the pros are the C-Star is very, very easy. I can't imagine anyone who's used smartphone apps before would have much trouble operating this telescope. The size of the telescope also means that the pictures are a fairly good quality considering the cost. The cons are also to do with the size of the telescope. It's a larger telescope, but the sensor is still pretty small. So you're more zoomed in. It's a smaller field of view. So with popular objects like Andromeda Galaxy, Pleiades, Orion, people might be disappointed that they're sort of cut off and don't look perfect. You know, it depends somewhat on where they are in the sky, how they're positioned in the sky, but I think most of the time they're gonna be cut off because you can't control rotation with an Alt-Az mount like this. Now, of course, with smaller objects like the Dumbbell Nebula that I shot in an earlier session, this wouldn't be an issue because the whole object fits inside the field of view. Another possible con, it really depends on what you want out of a device like this is that it doesn't have many manual control options in deep sky photography mode. But I'm guessing most people who get this telescope maybe don't want all these decisions. They want the decisions to be made for them because the whole point is that it's, I think, supposed to be super easy. So that's a very conditional con. I think it'd be cool if ZWA offered like an advanced mode for people like me, but I understand if they just wanna focus on making it simple, which they've definitely achieved. So here are the pictures that I took with the C-Star, first of the Pleiades Star Cluster and of the Orion Nebula. Again, each of these are 30 minutes total and stacked and edited to taste on the computer. And last but not least, we have the 3D printed Star Tracker kit here from OG StarTech with a used DSLR, a used lens and a used tripod. To get this kit under $500, you do have to find some deals for the used components. The 3D printed tracker was designed by André Gajdash and he had help with a collaborator named Jugal Jessing who did much of the work on the electronics and the firmware. And I was really excited for André to send me this and for me to try it out because I love projects like this, like DIY projects that are really neat. I think the coolest part of the design here is that it uses belts rather than just gears, which is typical with a Star Tracker of this size. If you order the kit from them, it will come partially assembled, but it does require some careful assembly on your own. It's nothing super difficult if you've done a little bit of DIY stuff before and there are instruction videos for putting it together. Once the tracker is assembled, you can attach it to a tripod. I'm using a used Bogan 3001, which is a very good tripod that you can get for about 50 bucks used with a head. I highly recommend it. Another option is you can, if you can find a surveyors tripod at a good price, those are gonna be a bit bigger than this, but they're very, very stable and good as well. And to save money, I'm just using a very small, inexpensive little ball head here, but I'd probably update that or upgrade that I should say because it's probably not the sturdiest, but for a lightweight DSLR, it is working. For the DSLR and lens, I'm using a stock Canon T7, which is one of their newer DSLRs in the Rebel line, but any modern Canon, Nikon, Sony, whatever kind of camera is gonna be okay for this. And then if you have a camera ready, just use it. And then for the lens, I'm using a Canon 75 to 300 zoom lens from Canon. You can find these very cheap on eBay. And then I also have this inexpensive USB lens warmer that will keep the front lens element from doing up, frosting up by keeping it slightly warmer than the ambient temperature. Okay, and that's it. The intervalometer for this is included with the Star Tracker app. So you just need a cable here to go to the little control box and then you're set for intervalometer. So to get this going, the setup, you're gonna attach your camera and lens. You're gonna point your mount towards the north, point your camera towards where, roughly towards where you're shooting. So I'm gonna shoot the Pleiades Star Cluster. And then I'm gonna fine tune polar alignment with this laser pointer here. This is a green laser pointer. You just follow the green laser beam until it's pointed at Polaris while adjusting these Alt As knobs that are a part of the mount. And then when you're polar aligned, at least roughly polar aligned with the laser pointer, you're good to go if you wanna stick with short exposures. If you want longer exposures, longer focal lengths, you probably want a better polar alignment. In that case, you can use tools like Nina's Manual three point polar alignment on a laptop. I'm keeping it simple though tonight and I'm just gonna go with 200 millimeter focal length, 45 second exposures, which should be fine for a laser pointer polar alignment. Once we're polar aligned, we can then manually get the camera aligned on target and focused on the stars. So to find objects with a zoom lens, I recommend zooming all the way out, which on this lens is 75 millimeters. That's gonna allow you to see sort of the constellations in live view. You can turn up your ISO. Once you've found your target, which Pleiades is pretty easy, then you can just zoom in to your desired focal length with the object centered. And then once you've zoomed in, you're centered, I would start focusing. With a lens like this, you're gonna wanna put it in manual focus and move the focus ring back and forth. You might see a thin magenta ring of chromatic aberration when you're at best focus, that's completely normal. Another telltale sign of when you reach best focus is if you look in the dark areas of the screen when you reach best focus, you should see several dimmer, smaller stars pop into view that are gonna be completely disappeared when you're out of focus. Okay, we're almost there. Now we can connect the control box to power just with the USB-C cable. You can use a battery bank, like I'm using an anchor battery bank I already had around. You can also just connect it to AC power like a wall outlet, if you have one of those bricks for USB power. Once connected, you'll see that the control box creates its own Wi-Fi network. You connect to that in a private window on a web browser. You can use a mobile web browser on your phone. And then once you're connected, go to tracker.com and this is the interface for the mount. And it's very simple, but I like that. We can then connect the wire from the RA on the control box to the motor here and then start tracking. And then when we want to start taking pictures, we can just use this built-in intervalometer in the app and it will control the camera for us. The pros for this kit are that it's flexible, it's upgradable. OG StarTech has seemed to indicate that they're gonna offer upgrades like a declination motor upgrade. There's obviously better lenses you could get for this like the Rokinon 135 F2. It's gonna be really, really nice upgrade because the picture quality is gonna be much better. Even if you upgraded from this tracker to a bigger mount and a telescope, you could keep the camera. So there's many upgrade paths with this kit that don't really exist with these smart telescopes. You're locked in with these. Another pro is that by changing the lens or even changing the zoom on the lens, you get different kinds of shots in terms of field of view, which I think opens up a lot more creative possibilities because when you change your field of view, it's a very different kind of shot like from like a wider Milky Way shot to a more zoomed in thing on a Nebula. And so that's, I think, a pro. The last pro is you can take longer exposures, right? These are limited to 10, 15 seconds. The dwarf might go a little bit longer than that, but this one, you're only limited by your polar alignment. If you do a really good polar alignment, you could do one minutes, two minutes, three minutes. It sort of depends on your focal length, but these ones have sort of a locked in exposure time and this one, you could go much longer. And the point of longer sub exposures is you end up with a cleaner image, an image where you can push it further, see dimmer details. Now, the cons for this kind of kit are of course that it's more complex. There's more setup time. There's more things that can go wrong. There's just more things you have to learn to operate this. So you can expect, if you've never done astrophotography before, to spend a few nights learning this. And with these ones, you can just bring them out and it's very intuitive. But I think those learning nights don't have to be out in the cold like this. You could do a lot of learning inside, getting to know the equipment. And then when you get out here in the cold, you'll be more ready to use this to its full potential. Another small con that I was sort of already aware of is that with a green laser pointer or polar alignment, these green laser pointers really stop working pretty much in the extreme cold. So you really wanna keep the laser pointer warm until you're ready to use it for polar alignment. And then a last con is that this setup doesn't have many of the automatic features of smart telescopes, right? There's no autofocus. There's no automatic go-to, the object. All these things are up to you to figure out with this kit, which either can be seen as a pro or a con depending on who you talk to. If you're asking me, I think that's part of the fun, but other people may disagree. Okay, so here are the final pictures I produced with this kit. This was 30 minutes total stacked and processed, just like with the Dwarf and C-Star, but slightly longer sub exposures, but 30 minutes total. Okay, now to wrap this up, we're gonna look at a more full image comparison from these kits. Starting with single exposures. Okay, and now we'll do the same for a 30 minute stack from each kit, but not processed, just stacked and auto-stretched. And now let's look at what the C-Star and Dwarf produced in AMP. So there's no processing, just what each kit made with the live stacking that goes on in the AMP. Okay, and now here is the Pleiades with my processing first full screen with each kit and now the crops. And these were all processed with just Cyril and Photoshop. I tried to follow very similar steps with each one. And then finally, the Orion Nebula processed by me. Here's full screen and here are the crops on that one. So my final thoughts on this, who are these different kits for? The Star Tracker plus DSLR route is perfect for someone who's looking at astrophotography longer term. They want the upgrade path. They're also okay with learning the complexities of polar alignment, finding objects, manually focusing. These are all skills you have to learn to use this kit. The C-Star is for someone who wants to do a one-time purchase that's good enough to get good pictures, doesn't care about upgrading, or if they will upgrade, they're fine with just buying something completely different is what I mean. And they want something simple to use that makes seeing lots of deep sky objects in the night sky really easy. The Dwarf is similar to that, but it's for people who want the more, either the more compact, smaller smart telescope at the cost of image quality to some extent, or they want something that's a little bit more hackable. Like the Dwarf, I think is easier to do some kind of like polar alignment, get longer exposures. It has a lot more control over sort of the photographic controls. So it's sort of like the C-Star, but already sort of more open to a little bit of control on it. And then the last thing with the Dwarf is that it also is a wider field of view while the C-Star cuts off some objects. And I talked a little bit about that. A lot of people ask me, well, what's your favorite? It's not really about me. I mean, I really just hope to present the information and help you make a decision. But if you really want to know, I would go with this kit because that's my personality is I really love DSLRs and Star Trackers. And that's what I grew up on in the hobby. What I first had was a Star Tracker and DSLR kit. So it's what I really love. But I could see someone just getting started maybe would fall in love with these smart telescopes and find those a lot more fun. So it's really just about you and what you think you'll enjoy. Since this video is over 20 minutes long, you're now seeing all the members of the Nebula Photos Patreon community. There are over 1,000 astrophotographers signed up and it's allowed me to pursue this, this YouTube channel and the Patreon full-time as my job. And I take it really seriously. For as little as $1 a month, you get access to most of the posts that I do over on Patreon, including exclusive videos, a monthly Q&A, and you get access to the Nebula Photos Patreon Discord channels where we chat about asking photography 24 seven. You can ask questions. I also organize monthly imaging challenges over there with the chance to get your image in the Hall of Fame or in a printed calendar. And there are other tiers as well. For example, I offer other benefits like early access and ad-free videos at $7 a month and it goes up from there. So if you enjoy my videos, you wanna allow me to keep making them. This is the best way to support that mission. So head to patreon.com slash Nebula Photos and join us. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver. Clear skies.