Seestar S50 Pro Captures the Cocoon Nebula After 5 Hours | IC 5146

I continue to be impressed by what the new Seestar S50 Pro can pull out of the night sky.

This is the Cocoon Nebula, IC 5146, captured with the Seestar S50 Pro over approximately five hours.

IC 5146 is an interesting test for a small smart telescope because the bright central Cocoon Nebula is only part of the story. The region also contains dark nebulosity and a much fainter surrounding field of dust, which becomes increasingly difficult to reveal as you stretch the image.

Five hours is also considerably different from the quick 20 or 30 minute smart telescope images we’re accustomed to seeing. I wanted to find out what happens when you treat the S50 Pro more like a traditional astrophotography rig and simply give it a lot of integration time.

The answer is that there is quite a bit of data hiding in these little 50 mm optics.

The Seestar S50 Pro uses a 50 mm aperture, 260 mm focal length optical system, and its equatorial mode allows exposures as long as 60 seconds. For this image, I let the telescope accumulate data on IC 5146 for roughly five hours and then worked with the resulting stack.

What continues to surprise me about the S50 Pro isn’t that it can photograph objects like the Cocoon Nebula. The original Seestar S50 could already do that. It’s how far you can push the newer S50 Pro when you give it several hours under the sky.

There’s a point where these little smart telescopes stop feeling like electronic observing devices and start behaving much more like legitimate astrophotography systems.

And five hours on the Cocoon Nebula makes that point pretty well.

Equipment: ZWO Seestar S50 Pro
Target: IC 5146, Cocoon Nebula
Integration: Approximately 5 hours
Telescope aperture: 50 mm
Focal length: 260 mm
Mounting: Equatorial mode
Location: Missouri, Bortle 3

I’ve also been documenting my month of testing the new S50 Pro, including its optics, sensor performance, equatorial mode and real-world astrophotography results in my full Seestar S50 Pro review here on ScopeTrader.

What do you think? Is this getting close enough that you’d consider a smart telescope a legitimate astrophotography rig?