Smart Telescope: From Galileo's Tube to ABB Robots

A smart telescope is a small robot that points itself at the sky. You set it on a tripod, open an app, tap a galaxy, and the motors find it, track it and build up a picture from hundreds of short exposures. This post follows how we got here, from Galileo's hand-held tubes and Newton's first reflector to the computerised GoTo mounts of the 1990s and the app-driven scopes from Unistellar, Vaonis, ZWO and Dwarflab. It ends with where industrial robots, including ABB arms, already help make and run telescopes, and where they could help next.

A ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope on its tripod under a blue sky. Photo: El Mexicano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How stargazers found and followed the sky by hand

For most of the telescope's history, the observer was the pointing system. Galileo Galilei built his own refractors in 1609 and 1610, and two of them survive at the Museo Galileo in Florence. He found Jupiter's moons by aiming a long tube by hand and sketching what he saw. Isaac Newton completed the first working reflecting telescope in 1668, using a curved mirror in place of a lens. The Newtonian design stayed popular with amateur makers because a single mirror is cheaper to grind than a large lens.

Two of Galileo's telescopes from 1609 and 1610 at the Museo Galileo in Florence. Photo: Zde / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Finding an object took skill. Observers learned star charts, hopped from one bright star to the next, and nudged the tube along as the Earth turned. By the 19th century larger instruments had clockwork drives that turned an equatorial mount at the rate the sky moves, so a target stayed in view. In San Francisco in the 1960s John Dobson popularised simple reflectors on plywood rocker boxes, cheap enough to build at home and pushed around by hand. You can still buy Dobsonian telescopes today, and amateur telescope makers still build their own.

A replica of Isaac Newton's 1668 reflecting telescope. Photo: The Science Museum UK / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Computers changed this. In 1992 Meade Instruments launched the LX200, 8 and 10 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes on computerised mounts. Motors drove both axes, and software with optical encoders corrected pointing errors that once needed expensive machining. This is the GoTo idea: you align the mount on one or two known stars, pick an object from a built-in catalogue such as the Messier list, and the mount slews to it and tracks it. Later LX200GPS models added a GPS receiver so the scope knew its own time and position.

The control panel of a Meade LX200GPS computerised telescope at Jiamusi University Observatory. Photo: Cok3307788 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Smart telescopes in 2026 and where ABB fits

Smart telescopes go one step further and drop the eyepiece. Unistellar, founded in Marseille in 2015, showed its eVscope prototype at CES 2017. The 114 mm reflector sends light onto a camera sensor and stacks frames live, so faint galaxies appear on a phone within minutes. Shipping slipped to 2020, but by 2024 the company said 25,000 units had been sold. Owners also do citizen science with the SETI Institute, timing exoplanet transits and asteroid occultations. ZWO's Seestar S50, introduced in April 2023, pushed the price down further.

The total solar eclipse of 12 August 2026 photographed with a Seestar S50. Photo: JulienR37 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The market is busy this autumn. Space.com reported on 17 September 2026 that ZWO's new Seestar S50 Pro could be ordered for $999 after an $899 launch offer. It keeps a 50 mm four-element apochromatic lens but adds a second 8.3 megapixel camera with a 63 degree wide-angle view, a 10,000 mAh battery rated for up to nine hours of stacking, and 128 GB of storage. Notebookcheck reported on 9 September that Dwarflab had announced a new smart telescope called Draco. Under the plastic, each of these is a robot: two motor axes, a camera, sensors and a computer that plans moves.

The Ring Nebula captured live with a Unistellar eVscope in October 2021. Photo: Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make telescopes, and we found no public ABB project with a smart telescope maker, so this part is about fit. The devices are dense electronic products with motors, gearboxes, sensors and boards, the kind of small-part work the dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 was designed for. Lenses and camera sensors need dust-free handling, which is what the IRB 1300 Clean Room variant is built for. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could run end-of-line tests or pack finished scopes beside people. Our post on PCB assembly cells covers the electronics side in more detail.

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robotic stargazing

Industrial arms already reach into big astronomy. At the University of Huddersfield, researchers worked with partners on using industrial robots alongside CNC polishing machines to make 1.4 metre mirror segments for the European Extremely Large Telescope, taking over manual handling steps and pre-processing surfaces. At Japan's Kiso Observatory, a paper describes a six-axis industrial arm that swaps filters at the telescope's focal plane and stays out of the light path while observing. Work like this is usually planned and checked in simulation first, for example in RobotStudio, before a robot goes near a costly mirror.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS observed with a Unistellar telescope from Kosovo in October 2024. Photo: Astroclubkosova / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

At home, the trend points to scopes that need even less from the owner. Equatorial modes, longer batteries and wide-angle cameras are already arriving through hardware revisions and software updates. Networks of small telescopes are the more interesting step. Unistellar users have recorded dozens of exoplanet transits and hundreds of asteroid occultations, and amateur smart telescope owners shared images of the interstellar comet that entered the Solar System in July 2025. A backyard robot that schedules its own nights and uploads data for researchers is a short step from there.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot. Photo: ABB

Cost is the first problem. A new Seestar S50 Pro lists at $999, about what a good laptop costs, and any factory that automates assembly needs the robots to pay back before the next model arrives. Light pollution limits what any small telescope can see, however clever its software. Skills matter too, both for owners who never learn the sky and for factory staff who now program robots instead of assembling by hand. Tools like Wizard easy programming and SafeMove aim at that second group, making it simpler and safer to put a cobot next to a person.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

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