With 2K image quality, a light pollution filter and a user-friendly interface, it's a smart telescope that anyone can enjoy, regardless of your experience level, and regardless of whether you're shooting from your city balcony or a dark sky site. Like the other models, it uses dual cameras to capture a wide range of subjects, including deep-sky objects with the telephoto camera, and constellations, star trails and the Milky Way with the wide-angle camera. It's lightweight and easy to travel with, and it even comes with a separate solar filter for solar imaging and eclipse time-lapses.

We got our hands on an advance copy to test ahead of its release, so we put it through its paces on several different celestial subjects.

Design & Setup

• Quick and easy set-up
• Comes with carry case, tripod and solar filter
• Lightweight and easy to transport

The Seestar S30 Plus is one of the smallest, most compact smart telescopes on the market, weighing just 3.63 pounds (1.65 kg) and measuring 8.3 x 5.5 x 3.2 inches (210 x 140 x 80 mm). Its sleek, matte white design looks identical to the other Seestar models (we compared it to our S30 Pro), except for the branding on the unit itself.

It comes in a padded soft carry case and includes a small tripod (although we always prefer to use our own), a solar filter, a 40-inch (1 meter) USB-A to USB-C charging cable, a removable shoulder strap for the carry case, and a quick-start guide. With its accessories and case, the whole setup weighs 4.89 pounds (2.22 kg).

On the unit itself, you'll find just one button, which powers it on, plus the USB-C port on the side. Super simple, although we'd have liked the USB-C port to be covered to prevent moisture or dust from getting in.

The set-up process couldn't be easier. When you turn the telescope on, you'll hear a double beep and see the power button light up alongside the red dots on the black screen to indicate the battery level. Four dots mean the battery is full. The telescope will tell you when it's ready to connect, at which point you can sync it up to the app on your smartphone or tablet. To turn it off, you just select "Shutdown" in the app, which closes the arm and turns the unit off.

It also features an anti-dew heater, which we've found works quite well in mild to moderate humidity. On a couple of our shoots, we noticed a tiny bit of condensation forming on the unit when the humidity was higher, so we wouldn't feel confident leaving it unsupervised for long periods on a particularly dewy evening. (We used the Clear Outside app to monitor the humidity levels.)

The Seestar App

• User-friendly and easy to navigate
• A good amount of image editing controls, but we'd like a few more
• Educational and shows what's in the sky for your time and location

The Seestar App is user-friendly and easy to navigate, with just the right amount of controls: you have plenty of options to choose from but it doesn’t become overwhelming. The main Seestar page is where you'll likely spend most of your time, as this is where you can search for celestial objects to shoot, access your album, plan a shoot and read up on what objects Seestar recommends based on your time and location.

The Stargazing section is where you can select or search for the subject you want to shoot. You can use the search function to find a specific target or browse Tonight's Best, and you can also search through different types of subjects like galaxies, nebulas, clusters and more. From here, you can also select planets, track comets and photograph constellations using the wide camera.

Click on a subject and the app will display information about it, including its current altitude and coordinates, which help determine what time is best to shoot that particular object. It automatically applies the appropriate filters and settings, but you can override these if you want to.

There's very little to complain about when it comes to using the app. It has lots of information for beginners, so you don't need a ton of knowledge about the night sky, and everything is fairly self-explanatory. There were a couple of occasions when it failed to calibrate itself (for example, when we tried to locate the Pleiades, which had just risen above a tree), and other times when we chose a new target and it slewed the long way round instead of only having to move slightly. But otherwise, the app worked well.

The AI Enhance section has some good editing tools to bring out the best from your photos. You can reduce the stars, adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation and RGB curves, apply denoise and eliminate any satellite trails — although we'd love a dehaze slider to bring out some of the fainter nebulosity of certain objects. The sliders could do with being a little more responsive, especially the RGB curves, but overall, it does a pretty good job of editing your pictures to get a pleasing result.

Astrophotography

• 160mm focal length perfectly suits larger apparent subjects
• Built-in filters to bring out colors
• Modest image resolution, but still pretty good

We had about 10 days to test our review unit before its release, so we could only capture as much as the weather permitted in that time. We'll add more images to this review over the coming weeks. All our tests were conducted from our backyard in a Bortle 4 region, and captured before moonrise to eliminate as much light pollution as possible. Due to these time constraints, we aimed to capture our images for a total of 60 minutes each, although we'd have ideally aimed for longer in some cases.

Now for the fun part — the images. The Seestar S30 Plus has a focal length of 160mm, which is advantageous for capturing large subjects like the Andromeda Galaxy, the North America Nebula and the Pleiades. Large emission nebulas are where it really shines; however, the focal length is too short to capture smaller apparent objects.

For this review, we aimed to capture as many different types of objects as possible. All our images were edited in the Seestar app with, in some cases, a few minor tweaks in Lightroom. You also have the option to download the individual files to your computer to process them yourself in dedicated astrophotography software, which is advantageous if you're a more experienced user.

Star clusters

Everyone's favorite star cluster, the Pleiades, was one of the first targets we wanted to capture. We could see the faint blue nebulosity after as little as 15 minutes of integration time, and it only improved over time. After 60 minutes, we had a really nice image and could easily bring out the blue haze via the editing tools in the app. However, we got a much more impressive result after tweaking our image a little further in Lightroom, bringing out even more haze and reflective dust.

Galaxies

The Andromeda Galaxy is a perfect target for the Seestar S30 Plus. It takes up a large portion of the frame, and with long integration times, it can reveal beautiful details in the faint outer arms. We shot for around an hour in our tests due to weather and time constraints, but we still got an impressive image. As we approached 60 minutes, there was a lot of cloud cover, and we noticed it struggling to stack images toward the end of the session, so we stopped the integration at 57 minutes.

Andromeda is certainly going to be the most impressive galaxy for the Seestar visually, as most others will appear smaller in the frame and will need longer integration, so make sure you have a clear, dark night for it.

Large emission nebula

Large emission nebulas are where the Seestar S30 Plus thrives, and the North America Nebula is a great target. It covers the whole field of view, and the red hydrogen gas easily comes to the forefront of the image.

The Eastern Veil Nebula is another lovely target where you can bring out the beautiful red and turquoise hues in as little as 15 minutes, but longer integration times will yield brighter, more colorful results.

Planetary nebula

Planetary nebulas are where you will see the limitations of the Seestar's 160mm focal length. Most planetary nebulas have a very small apparent size — we've previously captured the Dumbbell Nebula and Cocoon Nebula with our S30 Pro, and they were a tiny dot in the middle of the screen. We tried the Helix Nebula, and even though it's one of the largest apparent planetary nebulas, it's still fairly small on the Seestar S30 Plus. You can still get a decent image of it, but if you want to focus on imaging planetary nebulas, you'll need a bigger scope. Because it was very low in the sky and there was some interfering cloud, we stopped integration at 27 minutes.

Should you buy the Seestar S30 Plus?

The Seestar S30 Plus is an affordable entry point into deep-sky astrophotography without the confusing settings and expensive setup. It's ideal for beginners, although more experienced users will likely want to upgrade to the superior image quality and extra features of the S30 Pro.

Still, for under $500, we can't complain. Not only is the Seestar S30 Plus easy to navigate and use, but it teaches you about space in a fun and interactive way, and you don't need to spend hours stacking individual frames on your computer to process — although you still can do that if you want more control over your editing.

If the Seestar S30 Plus isn't for you

I realized quickly that they were not doing a dominance hierarchy [which was previously thought to be the case], but instead, the most important thing in their life was their partner. They were doing pair bonds, and that's the core of their social organization, [with] males and females pairing for life.

KHC: Why is it important to study birdsong, and what can it teach us about intelligence and behavior?

JE: A level of complexity we were trying to understand was, what are the neural mechanisms that enable those birds to do this process of listening to something and copying it, and reproducing it, and doing a comparison between what they're producing and what they're hearing?

The zebra finch is a just-right middle ground level of cognitive ability that is interesting, where you see this pattern of copying vocalization and producing it. But you can look through the avian kingdom, and some species show more complex behaviors.

We know that there are some species that are able to not only imitate their own vocalizations from their own species, their dad, but they're able to copy other species. So, here in California, for instance, a mockingbird is a bird that is really known to be able to reproduce a bunch of different sounds and is actually incorporating this in their vocalizations.

Parrots are also well known for that because we have them as pets, and they're able to reproduce our own vocalizations as humans. This is kind of crazy, when you think about it, because they don't have the same vocal tract as we do. It's smaller, and they have a different system. I think a high cognitive level is when an animal is able to reproduce a sound that is not in their "native language," let's say, and use it for a goal. We do see this in parrots ‪—‬ they're able to ask you for something or even ask the dog to shut up sometimes, which is interesting. They're able to really use those vocalizations, such as "This is not mine, but I communicate with another species this way."

It shows you how smart they can be, and by studying vocal communication in animals, we are getting a window of what cognitive abilities they have and how the usage reveals their level of smartness.

KHC: Could you walk me through how you ended up decoding bird vocalizations?

JE: I spent countless hours observing zebra finches, and I realized that I could progressively do a match between the social context and the acoustic characteristics of the sound produced. I could recognize these sounds and understand what they "mean."

It's like at home with your cat or dog: Within a couple of months, you figure out every time the cat is doing this kind of sound —‬ "meow" — ‬it means he wants to get out or he's hungry, or he wants to cuddle. Same thing with the dog. It's the same process, but instead of doing this with cats or dogs, I did this with birds and constituted the first acoustic dictionary of zebra finch calls.

However, how do you know you are correct? That you correctly identified the sounds that correspond to the "words" in that species?

I thought that the best confirmation of whether I was right or not could only come from the zebra finches themselves. Up to now, nobody had found a way to systematically go through the vocal repertoire of an animal and confirm if each identified call type was indeed perceived as a word in that species' language.

To achieve this somewhat impossible discussion with a bird, we designed an operant conditioning experiment where the bird is asked to classify vocalizations that were previously recorded from other zebra finches. The game is simple and relies on two rules. The first one is that every day, only the recordings corresponding to one call type are rewarded by seeds, while the recordings from the other call types in the repertoire are not rewarded. The second rule is that the bird can interrupt recordings and skip to the next one whenever they want, like how you skip through songs on your favorite music app.

The bird is placed in a cage that has a button or a little infrared sensor that it can activate with its beak. Each time it does so, the recording of a vocalization randomly drawn from the library of call types is played. Four out of five times, birds trigger the playback of a call type that will not give them access to seeds. Because they are slightly food deprived, they only really want to listen to the rewarded playback, so they interrupt the nonrewarded calls and only listen for the calls that are going to be rewarded.

Every day, the bird has to find out which call type or "word" is rewarded. They usually figure it out pretty rapidly and then start interrupting the playback of all the other call types. Using this task, we could test a different call type every dayIf they had not been able to do it, it would tell us that the call type we had identified was in fact not existing in their language. If they were able to do it ‪—‬ and spoiler alert, they were! ‪—‬ it meant that we had correctly identified that call type.

The birds told us yes, basically —‬ the organization that you're proposing is correct.

But then we made a surprising discovery. We noticed that birds were making some rare and systematic mistakes. We wondered if these mistakes were coming from the acoustic similarity of the call types — how you might mistake, for instance, the word "glove" for "love" or "hurt" for "heart." Or if they were coming from the semantic similarity of the call types — you could maybe mistake "love" for "heart" if you are remembering about the general meaning of the rewarded word today, which is "love.".

In that last case, it would mean that birds truly have an understanding of their call types' meaning. We found out that birds' errors could be better explained by the meaning [the semantic similarity] of the call types. That is a big discovery in the field of animal communication.

KHC: Do you think we are headed toward actually being able to communicate with birds, or do you think it's more that we're still testing the waters and we still need to learn the rest of the language before we get there?

JE: When we say "talking with birds," I think we need to understand that it's not going to be a language. Right now, I am studying the zebra finch; it doesn't mean that I would be able to communicate with a crow once I have a repertoire. So there's this component of when we talk about birds, there are many different species.

I think there's more traction in this particular part of the animal kingdom than in other parts, just because birds are really talkative. Birds use a lot of their vocalizations to communicate with each other. So because of that, I'm thinking that the first species we might be able to communicate with, interact with vocally, might be a bird, just because they are very talkative.

For now, I found all those words. But we need to understand how those words are [strung] together. So it's not necessarily the case that we need to understand the rules of the dynamic exchanges between individuals or how fast you're responding, but how you are responding and whether that makes sense or not.

They [also] have [body] postures. They have specific displays at the same time they're producing the vocalizations. And if we really want to achieve full communication with another species, we need to get to that level.

It's not tomorrow for sure, it's probably not next year, but I think in the range of 10 years we should get there. Especially with how fast the domains of AI and robotics are. I have some hope that we should be able to get to that point.

KHC: Is there one takeaway you would want our readers to know about your work?

JE: Just one. The most important thing for readers that are not specifically scientists is to realize that, by studying animal behavior more generally, researchers are discovering the intelligence of animals. This is opening our eyes to other species and realizing that we're not the only species that is intelligent on this planet.

This is a lesson to us as another species on this planet, that we are not the only ones that are smart and we need to take this into account in how we are evolving.

We need to realize how we're affecting them and realize that they also have their own internal lives, and maybe we should start to respect them a little bit more.

Editor's note: Some of this interview was conducted via email as part of a follow-up conversation. The interview has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

Help us improve Live Science Pro: We're always trying to make our content better. Leave us feedback about Pro here.

What's in the photo? The summit of Alaid volcano peeking above a thick layer of low-lying clouds

Who took the photo? An unnamed astronaut on board the International Space Station

When was it taken? Aug. 2, 2019