Tested 2nd times on night. I am happy with it. Great for travel & camping. cool!

Seestar S50 photos
#2
Posted 21 October 2023 - 01:11 AM
My S50 arrived today from Astronomics (ordered 4/19/23). Out of the box first impression: it's tiny! I charged the battery, downloaded the app to my phone, walked through the simple initialization and firmware update, and was then able to do some AP with it this evening. The ease of use of the Android software and the results are impressive, especially considering the low cost of the unit. It's a keeper. Good fun! The best parts...no leveling and no polar alignment! This is hassle-free, relaxing EAA/AP ideal for beginners and casual practitioners. Too, the S50's small size and light weight offer great portability. It will be traveling!
Hopefully, ZWO will improve the Android app to allow the user more control over things like the exposure duration/frequency, stacking duration, and the file format.
The Veil shot was about 45 minutes of stacking. No stacking required for the moon, of course. The Ring was a very short duration stack. The images are cropped but otherwise just as the S50 app saved them.
Edited by Mojave Red, 21 October 2023 - 01:13 AM.
- Dave Mitsky, scottinash, Psion and 22 others like this
#3
Posted 21 October 2023 - 11:28 AM
Let me add to the growing collection. Got my Seestar S50 from Agena yesterday. Thanks much guys!. So I had read that some people with the new iPhone 15 were having issues. Me, nope. Got my iPhone 15 last week. Seestar connected, did an update and no issues at all. I tried all 4 modes and have some pictures from each one. I have to say, I am really impressed. I know that they had some initial software issues, and given that, no doubt, there will always be a bug or two around but this worked completely flawless to me. I've already have a few questions I'll post at the the end but my goodness, overall this is quite a nice product.
So let's get to it. Lets go to Deep Sky first as I'm sure that is of most interest to CNers.
Here is M27 with just a 2 min exposure. I didn't get it centered perfect, which was my fault not the Seestar. I was still figuring out what each of the icon functions were and how they worked. On the left you see the fulll size PNG from the file that was automatically downloaded into my Photo's directory on my iPhone. That was a surprise. When I first went to get the FIT files I noticed a small thumbnail jpg in the Seestar directory but no nice big photo. I was a little miffed because I didn't know how to get the pictures. I opened my iPhone camera to take just a picture of the Seestar. I then hopped over to the Photo's app on my iPhone, lo and behold, I see all of the stills that I'd taken with the Seestar uploaded to my Photo's database. Coolio!
On the right you see my reprocessing effort on the FIT export of M27. You can read the tools I used on the photo caption. The original is ok, the reprocessed is actually a nice picture. I like it.
- scottinash, Terra Nova, Susan H and 13 others like this
#5
Posted 21 October 2023 - 05:22 PM
Let me add to the growing collection. Got my Seestar S50 from Agena yesterday. Thanks much guys!. So I had read that some people with the new iPhone 15 were having issues. Me, nope. Got my iPhone 15 last week. Seestar connected, did an update and no issues at all. I tried all 4 modes and have some pictures from each one. I have to say, I am really impressed. I know that they had some initial software issues, and given that, no doubt, there will always be a bug or two around but this worked completely flawless to me. I've already have a few questions I'll post at the the end but my goodness, overall this is quite a nice product.
So let's get to it. Lets go to Deep Sky first as I'm sure that is of most interest to CNers.
Here is M27 with just a 2 min exposure. I didn't get it centered perfect, which was my fault not the Seestar. I was still figuring out what each of the icon functions were and how they worked. On the left you see the fulll size PNG from the file that was automatically downloaded into my Photo's directory on my iPhone. That was a surprise. When I first went to get the FIT files I noticed a small thumbnail jpg in the Seestar directory but no nice big photo. I was a little miffed because I didn't know how to get the pictures. I opened my iPhone camera to take just a picture of the Seestar. I then hopped over to the Photo's app on my iPhone, lo and behold, I see all of the stills that I'd taken with the Seestar uploaded to my Photo's database. Coolio!
On the right you see my reprocessing effort on the FIT export of M27. You can read the tools I used on the photo caption. The original is ok, the reprocessed is actually a nice picture. I like it.
Here is SH2-142 (Wizard Nebula) with the Seestar export on the left and my FIT reprocess on the right.
I haven't gotten around to trying to download a FITS file from the S50. It looks a little clumsy for Android users. How's it work on the iPhone?
Waid
Green Valley AZ
#6
Posted 22 October 2023 - 07:28 AM
I haven't gotten around to trying to download a FITS file from the S50. It looks a little clumsy for Android users. How's it work on the iPhone?
Waid
Green Valley AZ
Well on my iPhone, I was a bit surprised because I didn't expect it but all the photo's and video I took, because I controlled the session from my iPhone, the images were downloaded and put in the Photo's database on my iPhone. This does not include the FIT file. To get the FIT file I simply used a USBC - USBC cable and connected the Seestar directly to my Mac. In your case I would assume then you probably have a PC. It should work the same. The Seestar gets mounted essentially by Mac OS and I'm sure would be mounted by Windows. You open the mounted drive on your PC desktop and the FIT files are there. I don't know any other way to do it.
#8
Posted 22 October 2023 - 05:30 PM
Today it finally became clear and I could take the first photo of DSO with the new Seestar. Too bad the suburban sky was bad and moonlit, but the haze still showed up pretty well for the exposure. I removed some noise and removed the green noise from the image. You can get a larger and better quality photo by opening it in a new window.
- ETXer, Susan H, roelb and 10 others like this
#10
Posted 22 October 2023 - 06:55 PM
Hello Cners,
Having fun with the Seestar and while my skies are cloudy, I'm playing with the Google Snapseed and doing a bit of image enhancing.
HAPPY SKIES AND KEEP LOOKING UP Jethro
Edited by Jethro7, 22 October 2023 - 07:02 PM.
- Bill Jensen, JoanneC, ETXer and 17 others like this
#11
Posted 23 October 2023 - 09:41 PM
Hello Cners,
Having fun with the Seestar and while my skies are cloudy, I'm playing with the Google Snapseed and doing a bit of image enhancing.
HAPPY SKIES AND KEEP LOOKING UP Jethro
Wow! You’ve gone from “I’m going to throw this in the trash” to image taking genius. These are very nice photos.
- Phil Cowell likes this
#12
Posted 23 October 2023 - 10:13 PM
Wow! You’ve gone from “I’m going to throw this in the trash” to image taking genius. These are very nice photos.
Hello eyesoftexas,
Thank you for the vote of confidence. I did have issues that delayed the lift off that were aggravating. I will be the first to mention that I am a cybernetic Imbecile. It would be a safe bet that there are natives living in the mountain jungles of Borneo that have better computer skills than me.
I am still playing around with the image enhancing App and discovered a couple of things today. (1) - The App will perform circular enhancing processing and (2) - it is easy to over process images but you can get kind of cool and it is fun to use a bit of artistic license with the images. The good thing is the App maintains the original image so there is no worries when I mess up, I can start over.
HAPPY SKIES AND KEEP LOOKING UP Jethro
Edited by Jethro7, 24 October 2023 - 08:34 PM.
- Phil Cowell, Susan H, roelb and 13 others like this
#13
Posted 24 October 2023 - 06:07 PM
Is anyone else feeling a little guilty because of how very easy it is to capture cool DSO images with the S50? Now, if ZWO would add a planetary mode for photos of the bright planets the guilt would be almost unbearable!
- Susan H, cosmos47, beesy and 2 others like this
#14
Posted 24 October 2023 - 09:06 PM
Is anyone else feeling a little guilty because of how very easy it is to capture cool DSO images with the S50? Now, if ZWO would add a planetary mode for photos of the bright planets the guilt would be almost unbearable!
Hello Mojave Red,
I really ought to be but not at all. LOL... I know you are speaking facetiously, I used to do AP and quit because it just took way too much time. I am really enjoying the ease of the Seestar, as well as the 10 minutes of image enhancing, if you even feel like further processing the image in the first place. You can capture the images, process the images and post them in less than an hour. I fully understand that the Seestar Images are not going to match the images gained from long hours of stacked and carefully processed images. You will have to admit, when you think about it, the images that are easilly captured with the Seestar S50, are pretty neat as they are and being able to accomplish this with very little skill or effort from a device that is cheap by Astro Hobby standards is really awesome. If this was ZWO's goal, they have succeeded. No guilt here.
HAPPY SKIES AND KEEP LOOKING UP Jethro
Edited by mdowns, 24 October 2023 - 09:58 PM.
- Pierre D, Phil Cowell, 7Soeurs and 2 others like this
#16
Posted 24 October 2023 - 10:32 PM
Hello Mojave Red,
I really ought to be but not at all. LOL... I know you are speaking facetiously, I used to do AP and quit because it just took way too much time. I am really enjoying the ease of the Seestar, as well as the 10 minutes of image enhancing, if you even feel like further processing the image in the first place. You can capture the images, process the images and post them in less than an hour. I fully understand that the Seestar Images are not going to match the images gained from long hours of stacked and carefully processed images. You will have to admit, when you think about it, the images that are easilly captured with the Seestar S50, are pretty neat as they are and being able to accomplish this with very little skill or effort from a device that is cheap by Astro Hobby standards is really awesome. If this was ZWO's goal, they have succeeded. No guilt here.
HAPPY SKIES AND KEEP LOOKING UP Jethro
I guess I'll just have to bear the burden of guilt all by my lonesome. Sniff.
On a less serious note, I hope someone will come up with some sort of filter to facilitate photos of the bright planets. I know nothing about such things but will keep hoping. Of course, if ZWO (or maybe a hacker?) would mod the S50 app to allow the user to set the exposure duration that would solve the problem.
- Jethro7, John1957 and Paulie M like this
#17
Posted 25 October 2023 - 12:43 AM
The eVscope has a planet photography function. The planets are not pretty, but the telescope's focal length is 450 mm. Seestar with a focal length of 250 mm cannot take reasonable pictures of the planets, so ZWO does not even try.
- culpano, beesy, Jethro7 and 2 others like this
#18
Posted 25 October 2023 - 09:22 AM
Another very successful night with my Seestar S50. This little guy continues to impress me.
This is 60min on the central core of the Heart Nebula, IC1805
- Susan H, roelb, cosmos47 and 11 others like this
#19
Posted 26 October 2023 - 05:41 PM
The eVscope has a planet photography function. The planets are not pretty, but the telescope's focal length is 450 mm. Seestar with a focal length of 250 mm cannot take reasonable pictures of the planets, so ZWO does not even try.
Sad, but true. How can we fit a 5X Barlow into the little beastie?
#20
Posted 26 October 2023 - 06:38 PM
One of my favorite things to image is the Horse Head because it can be so colorful.
Here is my SeeStar image of it where I used the internal light-pollution filter and went for a couple hours at a bortle 3.5 location and then post-processed the resulting already stacked FITs file ultimately in Affinity Photo to further bring out the nebulosity.
- Dave Mitsky, Bill Jensen, Psion and 36 others like this
#21
Posted 27 October 2023 - 12:49 AM
My photos taken with Seestar has bad star shapes as if they had been taken with an uncollimated reflector. Other photos here have rather round stars. I wonder what I'm doing wrong. The mount is levelled within 1.5 degrees (per Seestar app).
- Susan H, cosmos47, marsbase and 3 others like this
#22
Posted 27 October 2023 - 09:58 AM
I'm still recovering from Influenza B that I caught on a cruise with my wife. Stupid thing woke me up at 3am this morning so what do astrophotographers do when they get woken up? Fire up a telescope of course!
I had my Seestar S50 still set up from last night. Last night I tried to shoot the Elephant Nebula but that turned out to be a bit of a bust as the framing of that object, in the FOV of the Seestar is pretty bad actually. I powered the S50 back up at around 3:30am and was looking for targets. M42 is up but I saw Comet 103P on the featured list and thought that might be interesting to see how the S50 would do on photographing a comet.
This shot was integrated just under 1.25 hours and I did some post processing in PI and Photoshop. Came out quite nice I think especially for the S50 setup.
Enjoy!
- Susan H, BruceRH, beesy and 7 others like this
#23
Posted 27 October 2023 - 10:00 AM
My photos taken with Seestar has bad star shapes as if they had been taken with an uncollimated reflector. Other photos here have rather round stars. I wonder what I'm doing wrong. The mount is levelled within 1.5 degrees (per Seestar app).
Everybody's stars are a bit like this. I use PixInsight, and in particular the NXT (NoiseXTerminator) and BXT (BlurXTerminator) plugins. These help to eliminate a lot of noise and as long as the stars are not too oval, BXT will "round" them out to look much nicer.
- Islander13 and Paulie M like this
#24
Posted 27 October 2023 - 02:57 PM
Everybody's stars are a bit like this. I use PixInsight, and in particular the NXT (NoiseXTerminator) and BXT (BlurXTerminator) plugins. These help to eliminate a lot of noise and as long as the stars are not too oval, BXT will "round" them out to look much nicer.
Thank you for introducing me to BXT and NXT as well as for the reply. I haven't used Pixinsight since trying it out a couple of years ago because I had thousands of very short exposure subs to process taken with a Dobsonian and Pixinsight's preprocessing took so much longer than alternatives and took up so much disk space (its own image format is bloaty and preprocessing step keeps all the intermediary files around). Perhaps, I'll try to use it for postprocessing of stacked images or images off from seestar. Besides, now that I have an eq mount (az gti with wedge) and can have longer exposure subs, I meant to try it again even though I'm happy with Siril.
Going back to the original question, I may be hallucinating , but images directly taken off from Seestar (I believe,) without any postprocessing seem to have better star shape than mine. I also remember reading or watching a video where it's mentioned that seestar images have round stars except in the upper right corner. So, I had a higher expectation.
#25
Posted 27 October 2023 - 03:07 PM
I also have two photos where the stars in the upper right corner are stretched into an ellipse, but the other photos are fine, so it must be the software and processing too and not the optics.