This is an honest review of the Seestar s30 rental now being offered by Starfront Observatory.

Like many other UK stargazers I am frequently frustrated by constant cloudy nights and light polluted skies. I'd previously seen adverts for Starfront Observatory in Texas which offered to host people's telescopes under Bortle 2 skies and frequent cloudless nights. Not wishing to part with my scopes I was intrigued to see they've recently started offering to rent out their own seestar s30s for $99 a month. After a fourth week of endless cloudy nights, in late February I took the plunge and paid the initial $1 deposit. This grants you access to their support portal from which you can then request rental of a scope.

Accessing the scope is really easy through the Seestar app and before long I was planning out whole nights worth of targets. You are obviously not guaranteed endless clear skies, and once a particular bad front passed I was seeing numerous successful shoots night after night. So much so I'd gone from having captured 40 messier targets and 16 Caldwell targets to having captured 109 messier (that elusive M30!) and 60 Caldwell within 2 months. Granted many of these were low on the horizon and weren't great quality - but I got them.

The Seestar s30 provided is on an alt-az mount - so there is the potential for dropped subs due to field rotation on longer shooting sessions. As I was only accessing it through the app there was also no means of downloading all of the fit files and processing them yourself. This meant you're also restricted to some degree on the number of subs you're able to stack within the app.

Starfront offer a status page where you can see whether the roofs are open or not and they also provide updates via their Discord server.

Starfront Status Page

Was it all plain sailing? Unfortunately not - the Telescope Network function within the Seestar app is still very new and at the time I was prone to countless disconnects and then being unable to reconnect, resulting in me having to log a ticket with Starfront to get them to reset the scope. Because of the 5 / 6hr time difference this sometimes took a while, especially at weekends. Since then this function has been massively improved with recent firmware updates and seems more reliable. The ZWO staff were also on holiday at the time for Chinese New Year so that didn't help with issues getting resolved quickly either.

Starfront themselves are also very new to this process and are learning as they go - at one point the scope I was renting was given to someone else 9 days before my subscription ended and they promptly wiped all my data. Starfront profusely apologised and it does sound as though they've learnt some lessons from this misshap.

Given those issues would I go back? Definitely - but I would plan ahead properly this time. I'd check the weather forecast in Texas and plan what targets I'd intend to shoot (for the first 10 days the roofs stayed closed due to them having sub-zero temperatures!). Being UK based we're not blessed with great weather and if they offered scopes on eq mounts with the ability to download all of your fit files I'd be back in a heartbeat.

Below are just a couple of the pics i shot out there - all processed simply in the seestar app. All of the shots I took out there can be found in the Seestar app by searching for #StarfrontObservatory# (as mentioned above I'll readily admit that some of the shots of targets low on the horizon don't look great at all). For anyone else who is currently frustrated by the constant bad weather I'd strongly recommend giving it a go. It's really easy in this hobby to become disinterested or disheartened - being able to check my tablet each morning to see how the scope was getting on in Texas helped me keep that spark going.

Check out Starfront Observatory here.

If you do sign up for a subscription be aware you'll be signed up to a monthly rolling contract so will be automatically charged each month.

Starfront Observatory - S30 rental review