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Like most telescopes, the SeeStar S30 Pro is known for what it can do after dark.
But after a nice night with M13, I found myself wanting to get my telescope fix in the middle of the day, so I decided to point it at the one target bright enough to see in broad daylight.
The sun.
This was my first time doing solar observing with the S30 Pro, so I was a little nervous to point it right at the sun. It just feels so dang unnatural as a long-term night-time observer.
But, after taking the proper precautions, it ended up working out and giving me something worth writing about. Here’s how it went.
Session Details
- Object: The Sun
- Magnitude: -26.72
- Constellation: Aires (May 2026)
- Location: Suburban Houston
- Conditions: Partly cloudy, clouds moving through intermittently
- Modes used: Photo, Video, Timelapse
- Equipment: Solar Filter (must use)
- Zoom: 1x, 2x, 4x
Field Notes
Before anything else, let’s hit on the filter. This is non-negotiable.
Pointing any optical instrument at the sun without a proper solar filter risks permanent blindness, and I want to be 100% clear about that before going any further.
Do not point a telescope towards the sun unless you know what you’re doing.
Luckily, the S30 Pro ships with a magnetic solar filter, and it’s well designed.
It pops on quickly, and the app actually walks you through it. When you prompt the scope to find the sun, it pauses and asks you to confirm the filter is attached before it proceeds. That’s a smart safety feature, and I appreciated it.
Once I confirmed, it found the sun in short order.
I learned that it doesn’t always center the object in frame, as the sun was slightly off-center at first. So I used the joystick in the app to nudge it, then let the auto-centering feature do its thing. After that it was locked in.
The clouds were actually a nice surprise. Watching them drift across the solar disk made for some interesting photos and video. Not ideal for detail, but visually it was its own kind of cool.
The S30 Pro is notoriously not a planetary imaging device so being able to use it on objects like the sun is a nice departure. It also means no stacking necessary!
Here’s the view with no zoom on.
On zoom options: 2x felt like the sweet spot (see the image below).
4x on the S30 Pro gets you very tight. As you can see by the photo with the clouds above, there’s barely enough room for the limb at the edges. It loses some sharpness.
For a clean, well-framed shot of the full disk, 2x is the move.
One reason I like 2X is that it gives you a good look at any potential sunspots.
We’re in an active period of the solar cycle right now, and the disk was busy. I could see several distinct sunspot groups without any trouble.
What made it more interesting is that you can cross-reference what you’re seeing with NASA’s imagery. They label each active region with a number, so you can actually identify what you’re looking at.
I’ve included the SDO image above so you can match them up. The labeled regions visible on May 11, 2026 were AR4431, 4432, 4433, 4435, and 4436.
Sunspots can persist anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of months, so there’s always something new to check. It’s a surprisingly dynamic target.
One thing to be clear about: you’re not going to see granulation, prominences, or solar flares with this setup. Getting that level of detail requires a dedicated solar scope — something like a Lunt or Coronado with H-alpha filtration. That’s a very different (and much more expensive) piece of equipment. The S30 Pro with its white-light filter gives you the photosphere: sunspots, limb darkening. If you’ve never done solar observing before, is still petty fascinating.
More live images of the Sun can be found here.
Final Word
Solar observing is something I want to do more of. The fact that you can pull out the scope in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and see active regions 93 million miles away — labeled, trackable, changing day to day — is a different kind of experience than nighttime work. There’s no waiting for dark. No fighting fatigue. Just setup, filter on, and go.
I really want to try catching the sun at sunrise or sunset when I have a better horizon view. The atmospheric distortion at low angles makes for a completely different look. That’s on the list.
But as a first outing? The sunspots delivered. And the safety features on the S30 Pro made the whole experience feel appropriately handled for something that could genuinely hurt you if you got it wrong.
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