I spent a year with the $550 smart telescope that's shaking up the astrophotography world – and this is what it’s capable of

A crop of the Rosette nebula photographed with the ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope and processed in Pixinsight.

Astrophotography is famously hard on the wallet and demanding of your free time. Sure, it's easy enough to snap a photo of the moon on your phone, but getting a good shot of a galaxy is an entirely different. But all that's changing, thanks to a new wave of smart telescopes that are ushering in a revolution in deep-sky photography.

The ZWO Seestar S50 is one of a cluster of these automated marvels that have arrived in the past few years. Like the others, it combines a tracking mount (to keep the target centred) with a computerized database and a camera in one compact package.