CelestronOrigin Intelligent Home Observatory – All-in-one Astroimaging and Stargazing Smart Telescope – 6-inch RASA Telescope – Fully-Automated GoTo Mount – User-Friendly – iOS/Android Compatible

I've been engaged in astrophotography for a little over a decade. I've got the big rigs (C14, C8, ED 120, ED 80, 8inch Dob, solar telescope, Maksutov, etc...) and I love all of them! However, my biggest problem has been twofold: 1. A lack of time due to running my own business in the construction field. and 2. Geographically, I live in a bit of a hole meaning I can only get a rough polar alignment with my German equatorial mounts and can't reliably use a guide scope.In other words, I'm limited where I live to about 20-90 second exposures on any of my rigs (depending on scope, weight, etc..) with my DSLR. While that has served me well, it's laborious (my C14 and CGX mount with counterweights is around 225 lbs) and VERY time-consuming (all the exposures, dark calibration frames, processing, not to mention breaking everything down). As such, I've kinda neglected deepsky imaging for the past couple of years and focused more on planetary/solar/lunar as it's much quicker.All of that said, I've imaged more deep sky targets in the past two weeks than I have in the past 5 years!!! Being at F2.2, this optical system (the RASA scope) is photographically very fast. If my math is correct, I'd gather roughly the same amount of light with this system in a 10 second exposure (the default here mostly due to the Alt-Az mount) as I would with an over 4 minute exposure on one of my F10 or F11 systems.Not only is it 25 times faster photographically than some of my other systems (think about the time saved!!!), it's on-board CPU and AI processing auto-stacks and processes the images! Naturally, you can put the raws on a jump drive and process yourself (I did some quick phone post process with what the Origin gave me in my attached pics, but nothing fancy), but I think I'm going to see what this thing can do out-of-the box default before I try to add any to it as it's quite staggering.Given my years and frustrations with the hobby/endeavor, I'd say the 4k price tag, while steep for many, is well worth every bit of currency!Add to the fact that Celestron built this thing with upgrades in mind (software, EQ mount, new camera), and this thing just keeps on giving.I wouldn't say, despite some marketing, that this thing is for complete astronomy beginners. By no means. If you have never operated a telescope and know nothing about the night sky, I'd say buy some binoculars, a star chart, and spend the next 6 months to a year becoming familiar with our place in the cosmos. However, if you know a bit about astronomy but little to nothing about astrophotography, this thing will probably be a breeze for you especially if you're even a little tech savvy and/or have photography experience (like with photoshop, light room, etc...). Perhaps a total beginner would have success with it, but I'm not ready to make that claim across the board.However, if you've spent WAAAAAYYYYYYY too much time like me (time you have in little supply) pursuing deepsky objects and want something quick, intuitive, and, most of all, FUN!!!!, this thing is for you.I absolutely love it and it's made me fall in love with astrophotography all over again!!!

The Origin telescope is absolutely amazing. Prior to buying it, I've been using a 12 inch SCT for astrophotography. As someone else mentioned in a review, it typically takes at least an hour to roll the 12 inch out, level it, and polar align it before I can even start to use it. Then, with its f/10 optical system, I have to take a lot of very long exposures to accumulate what I need for image stacking, followed by hours of post processing to try to get an image that I'm happy with.With the Origin telescope all I have to do now is roll it out into my driveway, level it to within 5 degrees, turn it on, and wait while it, on its own, focuses on stars, determines where it is, and figures out how it is oriented with respect to the sky. It takes a little more than a minute from the time it is turned on to the time that it indicates that it is ready to start imaging. You tell it to center itself on something that you want to capture an image of, tell it to start, and it takes a series of pictures, stacking them internally, and continues until you tell it to stop. I'm controlling it with my Android phone and it provides an image on my phone of what it is photographing that updates with each exposure, so you can see the results of the stacking in real time. When you stop the collection, the result is downloaded to your controlling device. With its f/2.2 optics, it requires much less exposure time than my 12 inch f/10 to get the same results. It does a very good job internally, but if you want to process the images yourself, you can output the individual frames to a USB device.I collected all of the attached pictures on the first night that I used the Origin telescope, in a little more than one hour of total time. I live in a suburban area and there is a fair amount of light pollution here but the telescope still performed very well. The pictures of the galaxies were taken with the default plain glass "filter" installed and the ones of nebula were taken with the optional nebula filter. I edited the output pictures using Photoshop to produce the final results seen here, primarily through cropping and increasing contrast and color saturation.