The wide variety of smart telescopes are great, but as with anything you get what you pay for. Putting together a custom setup where you get a high quality 50mm apochromatic lens, a good quality mount and a good quality CCD or CMOS camera is going to give superior results but will be a lot more expensive. Smart telescopes are designed for convenience and ease of use, and that is where they will beat a custom rig. Also, some smart telescopes like the Seestars and Dwarfs are designed for portability.
You can do science with them, but look into the capabilities to understand the pros and cons. For example, they have colour chips so you can’t just add a photometric filter. Though we already have a couple of observers submitting photometry to the Variable Star Section database taken with Seestars using the green channel from the colour camera. I got myself a Dwarf for its ease of use, portability, and easy access to the fits files and calibration frames.
The resolution will be the same as any traditional telescope with that aperture, focal length and pixel size. You can find results taken with a variety of smart telescopes in the BAA image gallery. Click the images to see the details of the equipment used to find those taken with smart telescopes
https://britastro.org/observations/
You can also search for ‘Seestar’, giving these images.
The best images are obtained by people who do post-processing of the results, rather than relying entirely on the inbuilt processing.
If you want ease of use and portability then they are hard to beat. If you want to extract the maximum science potential then a custom rig is the way to go.
Andy
