Two small telescopes

Nearly everything in the gallery — every galaxy, nebula, cluster and comet — was captured with a single instrument: a Dwarf 3 smart telescope, shooting from light-polluted city skies in Edinburgh, Scotland. A smaller Dwarf Mini has since joined it, and the newest captures are starting to come through that one instead. No observatory, no equatorial pier, no cooled astronomy camera. This page is about what these little telescopes are, why they work, and how the images get from photons to the pictures you see here.

The telescope

The Dwarf 3 is a fully self-contained robotic observatory about the size of a hardback book. Aperture, mount, camera, filters, guiding, plate-solving, stacking and power all live in one sealed unit weighing around 1.3 kg. You set it down, level it, pick a target from a catalogue, and it finds the object, tracks it, and integrates exposure after exposure for as long as you let it run.

Telephoto lens	35 mm apochromatic triplet, 150 mm focal length (f/4.3) — 737 mm equivalent
Telephoto sensor	Sony IMX678 Starvis 2, 3840 × 2160, ~2.9° × 1.6° field of view
Wide-angle lens	6.7 mm f/2 — 45 mm equivalent, with its own 1920 × 1080 sensor
Filters	Built-in filter wheel — VIS, broadband astro, and dual-band (Hα + OIII) for emission nebulae
Mount	Motorised alt-azimuth with equatorial mode, automatic plate-solving and tracking
Weight	~1.3 kg, battery and everything included

It’s really two cameras sharing one mount. The telephoto side does all the deep-sky work — almost every image in the gallery came through it, with a field of view about six full Moons across: wide enough to swallow the sprawling nebula complexes in Cygnus, tight enough to resolve structure in galaxies tens of millions of light-years out. The wide-angle camera sees a 45 mm-equivalent slice of sky and plays the supporting role — helping the telescope orient itself and frame targets, and turning its hand to nightscapes, panoramas and meteor-watching when the deep-sky side is busy.

A 35 mm aperture sounds like a toy next to traditional astrophotography rigs — and next to a 10-inch reflector, it is. What makes it work is patience: the telescope takes short exposures continuously and stacks them, so the real aperture is time. A faint nebula that shows almost nothing in a single frame emerges cleanly after an hour or two of integration. The integration time listed on every photo is that accumulated exposure.

The Dwarf 3 wasn’t a leap of faith, either — it’s an upgrade. Its predecessor, the Dwarf II, did sterling service here first: a great little telescope that proved the smart-scope concept was worth trusting, and earned its successor. When the Dwarf 3 arrived with better optics, a bigger sensor and the built-in filters, the Dwarf II was sold on to a new home. Almost every image in the gallery came through the Dwarf 3; DwarfLab’s smaller, cheaper sibling the Dwarf Mini has since joined it here, and every capture now names the scope that took it — in its gallery details and on its photo page.

The other scope

The Dwarf Mini is the smallest thing DwarfLab makes, and it now sits alongside the Dwarf 3 here. It’s built on exactly the same idea, scaled down until it fits in a coat pocket: sealed unit, motorised mount, plate-solving, live stacking and filters, all on board.

Telephoto lens	30 mm apochromatic, six elements, 150 mm focal length (f/5) — around 1,016 mm equivalent
Telephoto sensor	Sony IMX662, 1/2.9-inch, 2.9 µm pixels, 2 MP RAW — roughly 2.1° × 1.2° field of view
Wide-angle camera	Separate lens and sensor for framing, targeting and Milky Way wide-fields
Filters	Built-in dark-frame, astro (430–690 nm) and dual narrowband (Hα 656.3 nm + O III 500.7 nm)
Exposure	Up to 90 seconds per sub-frame
Mount	Motorised alt-azimuth with equatorial mode
Weight	~840 g

The focal length is the same 150 mm as the Dwarf 3’s telephoto side, but everything around it is smaller: 30 mm of aperture instead of 35, and a 1/2.9-inch sensor where the Dwarf 3 carries a 1/1.8-inch one. The sensor is what really separates them — it crops the field to roughly half the Dwarf 3’s sky coverage, so the Mini frames tight on a single galaxy or nebula where the Dwarf 3 takes in the complex around it. Less aperture and a quarter of the pixels also mean the same target needs longer to reach the same depth.

What it buys in return is weight: 840 g against 1.3 kg, in a body small enough to travel without being planned around. The Dwarf 3 is still the instrument behind all but the newest of the gallery, and everything on the processing side applies equally to both — same app, same Mega Stack, same finishing pass.

The sky they work under

Edinburgh is not an easy place to do this. The city sky drowns faint targets in sodium and LED glow — around Bortle 7 to 8 on the nine-point scale of sky darkness, which in practice means several times the integration time a rural site would need for the same image. And at 56° north there is no astronomical darkness at all from mid-May to late July: the sun never gets far enough below the horizon for the sky to fully darken.

Two things make deep-sky imaging possible anyway. The dual-band filter passes only the narrow hydrogen-alpha and oxygen-III wavelengths that emission nebulae actually shine in, rejecting most of the city’s light pollution outright. And stacking suppresses the noise that remains — the signal adds up across frames while the noise averages away. Galaxies and clusters, which shine in broadband light a filter can’t isolate, are harder from the city and simply demand more integration and clearer nights.

From photons to pixels

The telescope stacks frames live as it shoots, so a session ends with a usable image straight off the device. But single sessions are rarely where the deep images come from — Scottish weather doesn’t hand out four clear hours in a row very often.

That’s where Mega Stack earns its place. Built into the DWARFLAB app, it re-stacks the raw sub-frames from separate sessions — different nights, even different exposure and gain settings — into one combined image, entirely on the telescope itself. An hour on a target tonight, another next week, more whenever the clouds part: Mega Stack folds them together, and the multi-hour integration times on the longer captures here were built exactly that way, a clear spell at a time.

It also means none of these images is ever really finished. Targets get revisited whenever the sky allows, the new data folded into the old, and the image replaced with a deeper version — so the gallery quietly improves over time, and an integration time listed today is only a running total.

From there the image gets its finishing pass. DWARFLAB’s Stellar Studio handles the astronomy-specific corrections — star correction, denoising and star reduction that know the difference between a star and noise. For deeper manual work the raw sub-frames are archived and re-stacked in Siril, with stretching, colour calibration and noise reduction done by hand — always to pull out faint structure that’s really there, never to invent detail that isn’t.

The results, along with capture dates and integration times, end up in the gallery and on the per-photo pages; the occasional longer write-up about a specific target lands in the field notes.

What it can’t do

Honesty matters more than marketing here. A 35 mm f/4.3 lens with a small sensor has real limits: planets render as tiny discs a few pixels across, tight double stars don’t split, and small faint galaxies stay small and faint. The Dwarf 3 is at its best on the targets this gallery leans into — large nebulae, bright galaxies, star clusters, and comets — where its wide, fast field and tireless tracking count for more than raw aperture ever would.

All of that goes double for the Dwarf Mini, which trades away aperture and sensor area for portability — it reaches less deep, on a tighter field, for the same time spent.

That trade-off is the point. The best telescope is the one that actually gets used, and a self-contained unit that sets up in two minutes between Scottish weather windows gets used a great deal more than a car-boot full of counterweights.

If you want one

DwarfLab sell both scopes direct, and the DwarfLab links on this page are affiliate links: buying through one earns this site a small commission at no extra cost to the buyer. The discount code AMONGSTARS applies at checkout, and dwarflab.com is the place to start.

That arrangement arrived long after the telescopes did. Both were bought at full price, the Dwarf II before them, and none of this page was written to sell one — the limits set out above are the honest ones, commission or no commission. The same disclosure is on the privacy page.