Every image on this site came through a Dwarf 3, but the story doesn’t start there. It starts with its predecessor — a Dwarf II picked up on eBay in early 2024, as an impulse buy, back when the idea of a telescope that fits in one hand and finds galaxies by itself still sounded faintly like a scam.

It wasn’t a scam. The Dwarf II was a 24 mm f/4.2 telescope built around a Sony IMX415 sensor, the whole thing small enough to sit on a bookshelf, and it did something no amount of reading about astrophotography had managed: it actually got me imaging. No polar alignment, no counterweights, no cable spaghetti on a cold night. Set it down, pick a target, and watch a nebula assemble itself on a phone screen. My first target was the Orion Nebula — of course it was — and somewhere in those first minutes, watching M42 build itself up on the screen live, the impulse buy stopped needing any justification.

It taught me most of what this site is built on. Which targets suit a small, fast telescope and which don’t. That integration time matters more than aperture, and that clear Scottish nights are a currency to be spent carefully. That light pollution is a problem you work around rather than escape. The Dwarf II handled all of it with a kind of cheerful competence that made the limitations easy to forgive.

And there were limitations, honestly held. The small sensor ran noisy, with tiny pixels that made city skies feel even brighter than they are. Light-pollution filtering meant a screw-on UHC filter rather than anything built in, one more thing to fumble in the dark. Faint targets needed real patience, and some were simply out of reach. None of this was a complaint at the price — it was the deal, and the deal was good.

Then DwarfLab released the Dwarf 3, and the spec sheet read like a list of the Dwarf II’s rough edges, sanded: a proper 35 mm apochromatic triplet instead of 24 mm, the IMX678 Starvis 2 sensor, and a built-in filter wheel with a dual-band Hα/OIII filter — the single most useful thing you can put between a city and an emission nebula, living inside the telescope. But what actually decided it wasn’t the spec sheet. It was other people’s results. As images and reviews from early Dwarf 3 owners started appearing, the question quietly stopped being whether and became when.

So in mid-2025, after about a year and a half of service, the Dwarf II was sold on to a new home. No regrets in either direction — the money-where-my-mouth-is version of a review is that I liked the first one enough to buy the second.

Would I point a beginner at a second-hand Dwarf II today? With clear eyes about the limits above — yes. It remains the cheapest honest way I know to find out whether this hobby has its hooks in you. But if the budget stretches, the Dwarf 3 is the better instrument in every way that matters, and the gallery here is the evidence — every capture on this site, from 14-minute first passes to 7-hour integrations, came through it.

The full breakdown of the current setup — both lenses, the filters, and how the images actually get made — lives on the gear page.