Dwarf 3 Smart Telescope review – stunning astrophotography even in the middle of a city

Many of us from a young age gaze upwards and look at the moon. It’s cool, right? Being able to make out shades and even areas and craters with the naked eye is enthralling to kids. Or it was to me. I was less interested in stars and planets because you can’t see them as well. I mean, planets basically look like stars if you just look up and don’t know what you are talking about don’t they?

Then at some point, you get a telescope. It’s a cheap one so it’s a bit of a pain in the backside but you can see the moon so much better. Depending on your scope you might just be able to tell planets are not stars, but that’s if you can find them in the first place and don’t give up.

Many people give up though. Life takes over and you stop looking up, except maybe for the occasional glimpse of the moon. I did. Then about 10 years ago, for no reason really, I got myself a proper telescope. One that had a mini-computer on board that you could align to some stars and then use a remote control (called GoTo) to get it to automatically slew to what you wanted to see next. In the push of a couple of buttons, I could go from looking at the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon to Jupiter or Saturn. I could even point it at more ethereal stuff such as the Orion Nebula.

With this telescope, I could see planets properly for the first time. I could see the moons around Mars and Jupiter. I could see the rings around Saturn from my backyard in the city in the UK. I even saw Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

I could see nebulas and galaxies but they were so far away I didn’t really bother but I did jerry rig various cameras and laptops to my scope so I could image the gas giants.

Then I moved house and suddenly my view of the sky was less than it was prior. That scope still lies in my garden shed, it’s probably been out once in six years or more. The thing is you see amazing photos of galaxies and nebulas and even the sun, but you can’t get at those yourself unless you go deep into the thousands to get the gear.

Or at least, you couldn’t until recently. Which brings us to today.

Until the end of last year, I was totally unaware of a company called DwarfLab. They, it turns out make Smart Telescopes and the new Dwarf 3 scope was on the horizon (don’t ask me about 1 or 2, I have no clue). The word Smart means it fits right in with what we do here at Readwrite and Dwarflab were kind enough to supply one for us to review. And, wow I did not expect my interest in citizen astronomy to reignite so quickly.

What is the Dwarf 3?

The Dwarf 3 is a smart telescope. It doesn’t look like a traditional telescope, but in its defense, nor did Hubble. It’s not unfair to say the D3 is more camera than telescope, but it’s like the best camera you ever had to take pictures of the stars… oh, and other stuff too.

People who have pre-ordered their Dwarf 3’s are beginning to get them now but there has been a backlog so we were lucky enough to get our hands on one before the software was really finished. This software installs on your phone or tablet and allows you to control the small silver box and use it as your eyes around the galaxy.

It has a big battery inside the unit and you can hook in a power bank if you need it via the USB C port. That would give it enough juice to pretty much get through the whole night.

Looks-wise it looks a bit like the Mars Perseverance Rover, or even Wall-E or Johhny 5 (Google them kids), All the magic happens in the box and is sent to your phone. And there’s quite a lot of magic going on.

Getting started

Once you have synced up the app to your Dwarf 3 you can, if you are viewing from your own property, connect it to your own wifi. This provides the huge benefit of being able to leave the scope outdoors while you come inside into the warm and observe the goings-on on your screen with a hot drink. Perfect for winter star sessions.

Once connected you need to point the Dwarfs’ lens/eyes to the sky where you can see stars and hit autofocus. You can then calibrate it with another press of a button and the scope will swing around on your tripod (incidentally, not included, you will need one of those although at a pinch it will work on an outdoor table but I don’t advise it). Using cleverness the Dwarf 3 will work out where you are and what it is looking at, and, from there you can use the inbuilt star atlas to slew the device to whatever you want to look at and it will appear on your screen. Besides basic calibration, you can also polar align it for even more star-tracking accuracy, allowing you to take longer exposure shots of up to 60 seconds. It’s modern-day GoTo. So let’s have a look at what you can see.

What can you see with a Dwarf 3 smart telescope?

All the photos you can see on the page were taken with the Dwarf 3 In a heavily light-polluted city environment here in the UK. They have been processed in special Astro software called Siril to enhance colors and the like but the image you get out of the machine itself is still the most impressive astrophotography I personally have ever done.

It’s important to note here that because of science stuff such as the focal length of the lens observing planets is not a strong point for the Dwarf 3, or indeed any other smart telescope out there. You can see them, but they remain small discs with no real detail. Where the Dwarf 3 shines is in what it can observe though.

Starting closer to home let’s do the Moon. On a clear night, point the scope at our celestial twin and it will happily track it across the sky, taking photos at regular intervals which are then stacked to create a final, usable image.

What is stacking?

Without getting into crazy levels of tech talk stacking is what we do in astrophotography to get better images. Instead of taking just one and saying, there’s a blurry photo of the Moon, isn’t it great, we maybe take 200. The software then takes over and looks at all these images, throws away the worst ones – maybe a cloud passed over, or maybe the pesky atmosphere made a few blurry. It then ‘stacks’ the best ones on top of each other to produce an ultra-sharp single image containing effectively all the best bits from your set of images. We used to have to do this in Photoshop or special software, but the Dwarf 3 does it for us onboard. So when we start imaging the picture may look a bit ropy at first but if you return a few minutes later the detail will be better and the longer you leave it imaging the better it will be (up to a point of diminishing returns). You can then save this stacked image and post it on X or Bluesky or wherever.

The D3 also saves each individual frame however and lets you save them to your PC to work on them yourselves should you wish to. This is the best way to get amazing pics but the ones the Dwarf stacks are still pretty good.

Alright sunshine

So with the moon in the bag, one of the things I really wanted to try with the Dwarf was solar photography. I have never had equipment able to take images of the sun, which of course normally would be the destroyer of cameras unless you have special solar filters. Handily the Dwarf 3 comes with a magnetic set of basically sunglasses you can clip onto the lens and point at the sun which is tracked the same way at the moon. As you can see from the image you can even see sunspots on the surface of our star. The biggest problem in the UK is seeing the sun in the first place.

To boldly go

With the moon and sun imaged I wanted to go for a galaxy and what better than the closest and coolest one to our own Milky Way – the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). I have a good view of Andromeda from my garden in winter and you can make it out with the naked eye just about but the second you focus the Dwarf 3 on it the lens start to bring in more light and, as they stack together create a beautiful image of the galaxy itself and you can even make out other galaxies in the vicinity. The Andromeda images here were generally created from around 400 photos of around 15 seconds each

I have imaged M31 a few times with similar results and want to try it next from a location with darker skies so I can pull out even more detail

One final thing I had time to try before this review was a nebula. Skies have been ridiculously cloudy here for the last month, but on January 2nd the skies cleared for a few hours allowing me a perfect shot at the Orion Nebula (M42) – again you can just spot it with the naked eye, and had seen it (smaller) through my old scope, but nothing like I achieved here which I found was magical.

What else can the Dwarf 3 do?

If you are a little more adventurous there is beta version of the app that is accessed via information on the Dwarflab Facebook page, One of the most impressive things I have enjoyed during testing has been the constant stream of new features and firmware additions that have been pushed out.

Mosaic mode which takes images of more of the sky and there is now a schedule allowing you to select targets for the night, and the Dwarf 3 will image them and move to the next while you sleep and get up in the morning to a host of images stored on the internal memory of the scope.

We have also even had a UFO tracking mode added – perfect for recording those weird drones you weren’t expecting to see recently.

Beyond that, and something I haven’t yet tried is a daytime bird and animal tracking mode that may be of interest to you if you are into wildlife photography.

Dwarf 3 specs

The Dwarf has two lenses built in – a wide-angle and a telephoto and here are all the specs you need below.

Conclusion

Where to begin? If you have even the remotest interest in what’s above I cannot recommend this little scope enough. At just 1.3KG it is light enough to take on vacation too if you are going somewhere with good skies but even if you are like me and stuck in horrendous light pollution, you can see above what you can still achieve.

Part of the traditionalist in me is always going to think that it’s cheating a bit by not peering into an eyepiece desperate not to nudge a long tube of metal and ruin the view but as a way of seeing stars, galaxies, nebula, and even the sun, and maybe getting kids interested, this is a next level piece of kit.

Priced at under $500 / £426 there is a bit of a lead time on orders at the Dwarflab website due to the popularity of the Dwarf 3, so if you are interested, it’s probably best to get your order in as soon as possible so you can get gazing in the shortest possible time.

There are other options in the space (no pun intended) such as from SeeStar and Unistellar (more expensive), but at this price point the Dwarf 3 is unmatched currently.