Pegasus Smart Eye for EAA - Forums

Topic starter

Jul 13, 2025

Hi everyone,
I have been practicing EAA before it was called EAA.
I remember taking apart the old stand alone web cameras and gluing the plastic film canisters to them as nose pieces.
For several years I have been operating under the ZWO environment for both EAA and AP
I have recently received the Pegasus Smart Eye and of course along with a week of clouds.
I will be using this exclusively for EAA on my various telescopes and posting the results eventually.
I will be using mine with Askar V refractor using both the 80mm and 60mm objectives.
I will also be using it on my ES AR152 refractor.
I have two different sky conditions to use in Bortle 8 (in town home) and Bortle 2 (country home).

Has anyone else on Astrobin received a Smart Eye?
I have searched and found no results as of today.
I would like to see and share our experiences and especially what gear is used.

Please share your setup and your experience with the Smart Eye and what you think of it for the future of EAA.
These are indeed exciting times for astronomy.

Engaging

Josh Walawender

26 days ago

I finally got my Smart Eye unit out under the stars for the first time last night. There are a few issues which are likely due to it being a very new, version 1.0 device. Nothing major, and I expect those to be smoothed out quickly with firmware updates (there was one update already pending when I checked today). The biggest issue I had was that some objects, seemingly those with high dynamic range, did not show faint detail in the stacked color image out of the device. I did a quick stack in SIRIL for some of those and there is faint detail, so this is just a display/stretching issue which I presume can be ironed out and it might even be user error on my part. The system did produce some pretty nice images out of the box with no processing by me:

M51

M20

M22

I'm genuinely excited to do more with this. It's my first foray in to EAA and it will be great for outreach and a fun alternative to eyepiece observing for some fainter targets.

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Steve

26 days ago

The SmartEye offers only one control for stretching: the knob adjusts the gamma. Did you try that?

For tweaking other parameters (e.g. black point), maybe Pegasus could make those available through the web interface. The device seems to do a pretty good job of automatically setting the black point, though.

Dedicated AP software like Siril will always do better than EAA software with the same data.

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Josh Walawender

24 days ago

I did play with the gamma control a bit, but I should have done more. I was hesitant to touch the device during exposures since conditions were good. I was hoping that the system would write out the stacked FITS files to the SD card along with the individual FITS frames, but it only writes out the stacked PNGs.

My other wish list feature for this would be some sort of focusing aid. Watching the star size visually on the screen only goes so far. The seeing was great that night and I feel like I could have gotten more resolution out of the images. SIRIL suggested that the FWHM was somewhere around ~4-5pixels (~2.5-3 arcsec), but my visual views of Saturn at the end of the session when it was only ~30 degrees up were excellent, so I think the seeing was much better than that.

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Matthew Ota

11 days ago

I think that this new eyepiece technology will revolutionize astronomy outreach with the public. The best thing about outreach is letting people look through your telescope to get a personal connection to the universe. I plan to get one of these gizmos as soon as it comes out of its teething problems. Just like software, I do not go for Version 10, I let other folks do the beta testing.

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John59

Topic starter

5 days ago

I have had mine out several times and it has performed flawlessly.

I am so pleased with it that I intend to use it as my primary observing method.

It does well on an Alt-Az mount as it has excellent algorithms to stack and counter rotation.

I have done EAA and AP for several years but this makes things so much simpler.

Well Written

Leela.Astro.Imaging

5 days ago

I'm following this with interest, and waiting for a better v2 (whether from Pegasus - hopefully - or someone else). My hope is that someone will come out with an uncooled version w a modern glow-free sensor (like a 585) and with <90 degrees ocular FOV so less/no coma. That should be lighter, cheaper, less power hungry and better EP experience.

Steve

5 days ago · Edited: 5 days ago

The IMX533 is glow-free and is much better suited for this application than the IMX585. The square 3008x3008 IMX533 array is a far better match for the 2560x2560 OLED display than the 3840x2160 array in the IMX585, which would waste more pixels with its non-square shape and would also have a smaller field of view.

The SmartEye has a CPU, which is probably a bigger power draw than the cooled sensor, and the CPU may need cooling anyway.

I’d agree that a smaller AFOV, say 70 degrees, would work well.

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