The newest generation of “smart” imaging telescopes are a great way to introduce beginners and youngsters to astronomy. Multiple vendors including ZWO, Unistellar, Vaonis and Dwarf Labs make fully automated, miniature imaging scopes that have no eyepiece but provide a sophisticated astrophotography imaging setup operated by your smartphone.
The Dwarf Mini from DwarfLab weighs less than 2 pounds and can fit in a coat pocket! All the myriad components of an imaging setup (scope, filters, camera, mount and processing software) are tightly integrated into the compact scope. These scopes are full of compromises to make them affordable and easy to use but they dramatically lower the complexity of taking basic long exposure images of the night sky and sun. The images they take won’t compare with what you can get from a traditional imaging setup costing thousands of dollars but they dramatically lower the barrier to entry to astrophotography.
With the Mini on a tripod in our driveway, I captured about an hour of exposure time on the Orion Nebula (M42) and the Pleiades (M45) which eating dinner and watching a movie! Not bad for a miniature telescope that costs less than a smartphone.
Software in the app automatically “stacks” multiple (up to 999) exposures to reveal details in dim deep sky objects. You can work with the individual images and Dwarf’s image processing tools to adjust and improve images or download them to your PC and use Photoshop or other image processing apps.