Is your head spinning as much as mine when it comes to new technology lately?

It’s truly hard to keep up with it all, but you want to do the best you can because there are so many new developments.

In my opinion, the greatest development in backyard amateur astronomy is the introduction of smart telescopes. For several years now, smart visual telescopes have been available at a reasonable price and they’ve become so easy to use. You control with a smartphone or tablet.

Unless you prefer to, gone are the days when you had to do long, intensive searches using star charts to find celestial targets like faint nebulae, galaxies and more.

Now, all you have to do with these smart scopes is to communicate with your telescope via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to command it to find one of thousands of targets, such as the Orion Nebula and it’ll slew to that target.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Many scopes also will follow the target in the sky, compensating for the Earth’s rotation. Without that, whatever you’re viewing wouldn’t stay in the eyepiece of your telescope for very long.

These smart scopes have been a real boon, but in the last couple of years, there’s been an even greater development: smart telescopes, no more than the size of a breadbox, with the same ability to point and track celestial targets using a phone or pad to control via Wi-Fi, but these smart scopes have astronomical cameras built into them and not eyepieces. They’re also fairly easy to use and very reasonably priced.

There are three on the market, all for less than $600 and one for less than $400, that produce amazing astronomical photographs. I’ve been into astronomical photography for many years and have taken many wonderful images, but the telescopes, mounts, cameras, software and hardware I’ve used are expensive and require a fairly steep learning curve.

Honestly, with these new color photographic smart telescopes, you’re going to “see” a lot more than you would viewing with a conventional telescope. That’s not because of the telescope but more to do with the camera’s ability to not only gather light photons as we do with our eyes but also accumulate those photons, producing remarkable images. Our eyes and brain cannot accumulate photons that way.

What these cameras do is take multiple 10- to 60-second sub-exposures and then stack them to make them brighter, as well as cancel out electronic noise. The more sub-exposures you take, the better the photo will be.

The bottom line is that with even a few stacked sub-exposures, the image you get will be way better than anything you see through the eyepiece of a conventional visual telescope, even large telescopes. I know, because I have some really large visual telescopes.

Additionally, these smart photographic telescopes feature built-in light pollution filters that perform exceptionally well. I’ve taken images in heavily lit urban areas that are just about as good as those I’ve taken in the countryside. You can almost say that these photographic smart scopes are light pollution proof, unlike a regular visual telescope.

I’ve given this a lot of thought and really believe these photographic telescopes will become more popular than visual ones. They not only do a great job with deep space targets like galaxies, nebulae and star clusters, but also can produce wonderful photos of the moon, planets and even the sun.

Along with all that, they can take wonderful photos and videos of land targets during the day. I’ve taken some really cute pictures of ducklings and their mom on our dock, as well as all kinds of landscape shots. You can share your shots with friends and family, print them, or enhance them in programs like Photoshop, but you don’t really have to.

I truly believe that if you’re willing to spend $500 to $600 on a regular visual telescope, you’d be better off investing that money in one of these new photographic scopes, especially if you’re observing in a place with any kind of light pollution.

In my opinion, if you’re a parent and you really want to turn on a young person to backyard astronomy, one of these photographic scopes is the way to go, much more than a conventional telescope.

Specifically, there are three photographic smart telescopes out there that I would recommend. There’s the ZWO SeeStar S50 for $549, the ZWO SeeStar S30 for $399 and the Dwarf 3 for about $600.

Any of these three would do a great job for you, but honestly, the only ones I’ve used are the ZWO SeeStar S50 and S30 scopes. I’m extremely happy with them.

They have so many capabilities, and ZWO is constantly adding new firmware you can download to constantly improve them and offer you new features, like creating mosaics and more.

The SeeStar S50 is more expensive than the S30 model because it features a larger aperture lens to capture more light and also has a longer focal length, allowing for closer-up views. Both the S50 and S30 models also have fairly sizable built-in drives for storing your photos.

Check out some of these photos I’ve taken with my ZWO SeeStar S50.

One thing I really, really appreciate is that the Wi-Fi signal is so strong that you can control these scopes from the inside of your house, which is especially wonderful during the cold winter months.

Another wonderful thing is that you can communicate with your SeeStar, even if you’re using it in a place without cellphone service.

There are many places where you can order any one of these smart scopes. Just enter it in your browser.

One place I can heartily recommend is Starizona in Tucson, Ariz. I say that because I’ve been doing business with them for nearly 20 years. They have outstanding customer service before and after the sale. Check out www.starizona.com.

Collect wonderful celestial photons and be a part of the new telescope revolution!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.