DwarfLab’s Smart Mini Telescope Offers Portable Stargazing

Smart technology is revolutionizing the way we see and capture the world around us, as well as the way we observe the universe, without needing to be an experienced stargazer to do so.

We recently previewed DwarfLab’s Draco, which aims to sit somewhere in the middle between luxury smart headsets and compact (and more affordable, more basic) devices. We also reviewed Dwarf 3 last year.

The Mini is much cheaper and quite powerful given its weight and size. As the image below shows, its 100.38 x 183.61 x 60.70 mm (3.95 x 7.23 x 2.39 in) body is smaller in length and width than your average paperback novel, and only slightly thicker.

Similar to my experience with Thermal Master, I’ve been having trouble with outdoor technology lately: no clear skies at night for two months, a summer that has been relentlessly hot every day with no respite, and rain. A lot. On the other side of the world, when I unpacked the Mini for the first time, where was Under a starry sky, I had other problems (very typical of a small town in Australia), including local kangaroos swarming around me, when I could pull the device out from under the trees to find a patch of clear sky.

And when I almost gave up, I finally had, at least for a couple of hours, a rather clear sky, but only a balcony to work on and a lot of light interference from the fishing boats returning to the harbor and the streets below. I half expected an earthquake to knock the thing off the edge of the balcony when I left it there to do its job.

The Mini really is a stylish unit, weighing just 840g (1.85lb) and as I said, it’s surprisingly small for what it does. That’s why I’ve been taking it from country to country in the hopes of capturing the perfect shots, like some I’ve seen from real users online via the Dwarflab social media portal.

Now, this unit is not super powerful, but it is a surprise package that just requires a little time and patience to understand how to make it work for you. But it’s also very easy to set up and connect to your phone. While it requires a bit of experimentation with the accompanying app – standard Dwarf software if you’ve had other products – the company has found a sweet spot between manual flexibility for more experienced people and beginner-friendly point-and-shoot features for those new to the game.

In the image below you will also see the lens it comes with to allow you to take images of the Sun without damaging its night sky mechanics.

After setup, you also don’t need to be constantly connected to Wi-Fi, making it an ideal little device to take camping or hiking. While it doesn’t come with a tripod, a standard 1/4-inch mounting thread can be found on its base and works well with generic models that fit this size.

The company says you’ll get up to four hours of shooting from the Mini’s 7,000 mAh battery (charged via USB-C), and I think that’s pretty close. I played with it for almost two hours one night and in the end it was about 70% charged; however, there was a good 30 minutes of downtime while I tried to figure some things out. I didn’t realize those things. The app has a built-in AI assistant, but I didn’t find it very useful; a bit slow, text-heavy, and a bit overwhelming for beginners asking for help. But it’s also not unpleasantly present and doesn’t prompt you to participate, which is a really nice and much appreciated change.

It has a sensitive Sony IMX 662 sensor, with 65GB of built-in storage and supports JPG, FITS and TIFF image formats. The video output is MP4, but I haven’t been able to do much with this due to limited storage on my phone and some issues with not having Wi-Fi at home. The aperture is 30mm for telephoto and 3.4mm for wide-angle shooting, and the Mini’s autofocus is quite good. You can disable the automatic functions to have more control, but if you are a beginner I recommend leaving things as they are.

With 2.07 MP and a focal length of 150mm, you already know that you won’t get the kind of images usually seen on NASA’s online portals, even when, for example, 80 individual captures are stacked. So if you want to capture planets in particular, this model is not for you. To make up for the shortcomings of its lenses, compared to larger, more expensive models, the Mini takes many images in a single position. As such, and if you’re patient enough, you can leave it alone for a while and end up with some really beautiful shots of things like nebulae, star clusters, the Moon, star trails, and some interesting wide-field sky images.

A “mega stack” feature also allows you to combine snapshots taken during different nights, making it a pretty fun tool to experiment with. And from people’s images posted on the company’s image-sharing platform, I’d say some people are getting a lot of bang for their buck with this little model.

One thing I spent a lot of time on, and neither built-in AI nor what I could research could fix, was the problem of dark frames needed for specific goals. I’ve since discovered that it’s not just about adding the right “darks” to the menu for tele/wide settings, it involves precise parameters that aren’t given to you. Basically, dark frames help eliminate noise to capture better images, but every time I found a visible object, the app told me that I didn’t have the right dark frames. I also didn’t know what shadows I should create.

More experienced stargazers may not have a problem with this, but it feels like something that could be automated through the app to take the guesswork out of users, particularly when they don’t really know what they’re doing and why a recommended, found, and tracked object couldn’t be captured. (That said, there is a button to capture it anyway, but it would be helpful to know what you can do to program the best settings to get good photos.)

Basically, dark tones must match parameters such as exposure time, gain and resolution; however, the Mini already knows the settings for the imaging session and can determine that the dark tone library in the app does not match what is required. So I think it would be much more beginner friendly if it just said what is required and walked the user through creating it. Because creating them is really easy; know what you need to create… even less so.

I was a little happy to learn in my research that I wasn’t the only one who found this particular topic confusing, and that it might be something DwarfLab can work with in the future. Because otherwise its level of automation and usability of the app is really good.

However, it has some impressive app features, like Atlas View that lets you use your phone to explore what’s above you. And you can target a specific location or use the recommended list. The Mini will then rotate both its body on its base and the lens arm to follow the chosen target.

Just keep in mind that it’s less “point and shoot” and more “lock in for a while” because you really need to stack up your captures, as many as you can, to produce the kind of images you’ll get with smart telescopes at least five times their price.

A couple of small but important points: While your phone is connected to the Mini’s built-in Wi-Fi system, you can close the app and perform other tasks while shooting, without interrupting the device. This is very useful if your goal is a two-hour session and you just want to set it up and let it run without having to take care of it.

It’s also worth noting that the Mini is surprisingly mobile. Its base can continuously rotate 360 ​​degrees, while the telescopic arm has 225 degrees of movement. And you don’t have to touch machinery to get it to notice something or try to find what you want. Although the ideal would be a clear sky with few obstructions, and not a balcony like mine with limited window space and a night sky that becomes increasingly misty or cloudy as the hours go by.

Overall, the Mini doesn’t try to compete with models costing thousands of dollars, but it’s easily the most portable stargazing device on the market, and what it lacks it makes up for in other ways, such as its image stacking capabilities. It will take patience and a little time to understand the app and what it’s capable of, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of the Mini (figuratively, not literally).

And it’s one of the reasons I’ll continue to carry it in my carry-on wherever I go, because, given the right environment, I’m excited to see what its true potential is.

The Mini is available on DwarfLab’s site for $419 and comes with a two-year warranty and lifetime customer support. Which perhaps I should have leaned on more, in retrospect…

Also check out the DwarfLab site for full specifications.

Source: DwarfLab