Draco Smart Telescope Preview: Goodbye nerdy Astro rigs?

Normally, I skip previews on Wido’s AstroForum as I prefer focusing on real-world testing from my urban rooftop. However, DWARFLAB’s new Draco smart telescope is different, as I believe it might fundamentally change amateur astrophotography in the years to come. So let me make this exception and explain why, while giving you my thoughts on the technology used in the Draco.

For decades, deep-sky astrophotography was a hobby reserved for true astronerds willing to spend thousands of euros or dollars and a lot of time to master a complex maze of specialized gear. Think of tracking mounts, telescopes, cooled astro cameras, focusers, and autoguiding gear—with plenty of USB cables running to a PC or mini-astro station running astrophotography software just to control everything and capture objects in the night sky.

For the past five years, there has been a fundamental change where lightweight, affordable smart telescopes like the Seestar S30 or S50 Pro, and DWARFLAB’s Dwarf Mini and Dwarf 3 became available for a couple hundred euros or dollars. These smart telescopes can be controlled using an app on your phone or tablet. All you have to do is select an object, and the smart telescope will automatically slew to and capture it for you in the night sky. Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but it was a huge change from the nerdy astro-gear we used before that, and it opened up deep-sky astrophotography for a huge number of people who were not necessarily interested in spending a huge amount of money and time to capture objects in the night sky beyond what you could see with the human eye.

Now, we astronerds have comfortably seen the launch of these affordable smart telescopes, and while some of us have taken this trend seriously and tested them, others have disregarded them as cheap toys to play with. And yes, I often run my expensive astro-rigs and smart telescopes together and capture the same objects in the night sky, where I still see a huge quality difference in the photos I make with an affordable smart telescope versus my much more expensive astrophotography rigs.

Well, I’m about to tell you that this may change with the introduction of DWARFLAB’s Draco. What if I told you that with the Draco, you can take photos of deep-sky objects which could rival the quality of expensive, custom-built astro-rigs? That is, if the Draco performs as well as advertised by DWARFLAB. Why? To understand this, we need to dive a little deeper.

There are basically three reasons why my expensive astro-rigs can still outperform my affordable smart telescopes. First, I can cool my camera sensor down to below-freezing temperatures, which greatly reduces noise in my astrophotography photos. Second, I can accurately track the night sky using autoguiding, which allows me to take up to 5-minute exposures, so I can capture very faint light from distant deep-sky objects. Third, I can mount bigger telescopes with a larger aperture and a longer focal length on my (expensive) astrophotography mount to get more detailed images of deep sky objects as compared most smart telescopes with a smaller aperture and shorter focal length. All of this amounts to getting higher-quality photos of objects in the night sky.

But what if the Draco Smart Telescope promises it can do all of that as well? And what if I tell you that anyone could use it without any knowledge of astrophotography—like how to polar-align your mount? Just put the Draco down on a level tripod or table, switch it on, connect to the DWARFLAB app, and you’re ready to take cooled astrophotos of the objects you want to see for up to 5 minutes. At least, that is what DWARFLAB promises with their new Draco. Here are some images released by DWARFLAB of the Draco Smart Telescope.

So let’s talk a bit of tech, looking at the telescope, the cameras, and the tracking system. The Draco telescope is a 90 mm aperture and 340 mm focal length, blazingly fast f/3.8 telescope. Looking at the design, this is not your regular APO refractor telescope, but a catadioptric design (a modified Maksutov) combining mirrors and lenses. We clearly see what looks like a secondary mirror or meniscus lens blocking about 30% to 40% of the diameter. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations predict that the secondary mirror (or meniscus lens?) will block about 9% to 16% of the incoming light. Still, the Draco should collect about the same amount of light compared to an 80 mm APO refractor at a fast f-ratio, so that’s pretty exciting. Another question I would have is: does it need to be collimated? I know that Maks and my EdgeHD SCT were pretty well collimated out of the box, but over the years, you may want to collimate them. However, the Draco doesn’t appear to have any collimation bolts, which—in all honesty—I actually like, as collimation takes away valuable imaging time. But it does beg the question: are these Dracos well-collimated out of the box?

Moving on to the camera sensor, we see that DWARFLAB opted for an OmniVision OV50Q40, which is a new 50 MP camera sensor with an incredibly small pixel size of just 1.2 microns. A reduced FoV with a native 1×1 binning will be used for Moon, Sun, and planetary imaging. For deep-sky astrophotography, the Draco will use 2×2 binning down to about 2.4 microns at 12.5 MP, with every pixel capturing 1.45 arcseconds of the night sky. That is still very detailed, especially where I live in the Netherlands (sea level), where astronomical seeing is rarely better than 1 arcsecond due to atmospheric turbulence.

You probably remember the song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Well, that star twinkles due to atmospheric distortions. So what I’m saying is that even if you used a longer focal length telescope to zoom in more, you’d only magnify the atmospheric turbulence rather than taking a sharper picture of your deep-sky objects. In my opinion, this imaging scale is detailed enough for most individuals living in suboptimal (e.g., close to sea level) places. That being said, OmniVision is a new brand in the astrophotography business, as most folks use Sony IMX sensors with excellent quantum efficiency, dynamic range, and back-illuminated sensor (STARVIS 2) technology. It remains to be seen if the OV50Q40 can deliver the same quality photos in the dark.

The Draco has an active CMOS cooling system that cools the sensor down to reduce noise in your long-exposure astrophotography images. The specs don’t explicitly state the exact degree to which it can cool below ambient temperature, so that remains to be seen. However, it does state that the Draco uses the recovered heat from the cooling process to prevent lens condensation, which is pretty clever.

The main camera sensor offers a field of view of about 1.65 by 1.24 degrees, which is a bit narrow when you think about large objects like the Andromeda Galaxy. However, if mosaic mode is available as before, you could expand this native FOV by about 1.8x to capture a larger part of the night sky.

Much like other smart telescopes, the Draco will have alt-az tracking capability, which means you can put it on a tabletop or tripod, power it on, and let the telescope find objects for you. Any astronerd can tell you this comes with a downside called field rotation. Due to the Earth’s rotation, objects follow a path across the night sky, which traditionally required us to align our mounts exactly with the celestial pole.

Professional telescope observatories solved this a long time ago by introducing cameras with rotating sensors. By rotating your camera in sync with the Earth’s rotation, you eliminate the need for polar alignment, and you can use an alt-az mount that is much more balanced in terms of weight distribution as compared to an equatorial mount. This is why most professional observatories like the VLT use alt-azimuth mounts. However, it was never introduced in amateur astrophotography, until now. As far as I know, the Draco is one of the first to bring a rotating camera sensor technique to the amateur world. In practice, this eliminates the need to polar align your mount entirely, and it would solve the field rotation issue.

Moreover, the Draco introduces an autoguiding system that allows you to track the night sky for up to 5 minutes. In the amateur world, if it works, this would be a game-changer, as all affordable smart telescopes to date can only track objects for up to 1 or 2 minutes. And as argued above, most smart telescopes need to be aligned with the celestial pole. I do wonder if a rotating the camera would cause issues with potential dust bunnies that remain stationary in the optical system, causing potential spots or streaks on your images, but we’ll have to find that out once we can test the Draco in real life.

Beyond its deep-sky tracking, the Dwarflab Draco packs several versatile features. It includes a secondary 50-megapixel wide-angle camera (f/1.9) designed specifically for capturing landscapes, the Milky Way, and the northern lights. For captuirng different objects, the telescope comes in distinct filter editions: a Standard Edition equipped with a duo-narrowband Hα+OIII filter and an ND solar filter, and an SHO Edition featuring both a Hα+OIII and SII+OIII narrowband filters so you can capture an object in all the original Hubble spectra.

When it comes to features, the Draco packs plenty of storage with 128 gigabytes on board, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, and USB-C. It’s built tough for the outdoors with an IP56 weather rating, and handles temperatures from minus 20 up to 45 degrees Celsius. Power comes from a 77-watt-hour battery that gives you about five hours of continuous shooting in astro mode. And it weighs about 5.5 kilograms.

All in all, I’m really excited to see the Draco hit the market, and I hope to do a detailed review of it once it’s released. You can already pre orde your Draco with a currently estimated delivery time in November 2026. Here are links to pre-order the Dwarflab Draco Smart telescope globally, with estimated delivery times currently being in November 2026. Are you ready to pre-order this latest piece of smart telescope technology, or would you rather wait for my detailed reallife test of this telescope.

Clear skies!

Wido Oerlemans