ZWO Seestar 50

[powerlord]

and after a quick tart up of the jpg

[tooth_dr]

That looks very nice Stu.  Is that the full FOV, no cropping.

[powerlord]

first is, tarted up is a wee crop to take off the rotated edges.

remember, this is just the jpg. not done anything with fits- as still imaging

[DaveL59]

Nice shots Stu, sounds like you've decent skies at least. Here with the moon rising the thin cloud is more like  looking thru net curtains and the moon is just a fuzzy ball. The only stars I'm seeing are close doubles that are moving across the sky with a flashing star in the middle 😉 (yep, passenger jets)

[powerlord]

Oh yeh, a quick screenshot of my bahtinov fitted. And zoomed in.

[DaveL59]

On 24/09/2023 at 01:17, LDW1 said:

I have probably read this some time but what is the minimum temperature that the SS can effectively be used !  Below freezing, if so how much ?

I downloaded the guides just now, something to do given naff skies here at the mo. 

Also says forced shutdown above 60 degrees C

Edited September 29, 2023 by DaveL59

[LDW1]

1 hour ago, DaveL59 said:

I downloaded the guides just now, something to do given naff skies here at the mo. 

Also says forced shutdown above 60 degrees C

At 60° C we'll all shut down, lol !

[tooth_dr]

4 minutes ago, LDW1 said:

At 60° C we'll all shut down, lol !

Agreed!  In direct sunlight I’d say with the black cover it wouldn’t be long getting hot inside. 

[DaveL59]

5 hours ago, powerlord said:

Aha! Found some features - hidden a bit. So - about shows changelog for v1.9.. which is weird since it's not available... however v1.8 added stuff so did previous versions.

station mode is there - and it's now connected to my observatory wifi - so I can now happily control it from my bedroom like the rest of the obsy mounts. Also manual focus is there, so thats good too. Plus an advanced options you can turn on to save all individual frames, so can stack yerself later or do multi sessions, etc - I assume this will also save the darks it takes... no flats are taken.. but if it's saving the frames now, no reason why I can't take my own - though without bias maybe not that useful ?

 

 

 

So, station mode offers both 2.4 & 5 bands but seems your WiFi needs to be visible SSID, no option to add your hidden ones which all of mine are. I'd need it to display the MAC also so I can authorize it which doesn't seem available in the app. Oh well. Maybe I'll have to create a visible one just for it to use but I'd rather not tbh.

Nice that for me its reporting visibility at 1% and looking outside it certainly is with just the moon showing and almost no detail by eye. However I had to see what the S50 could make of it huh. Didn't find the moon with goto so I manually moved it and eventually got it centered. A bit too sensitive that manual direction control.

Had me fooled tho trying to find them on the seestar when it'd stored them on the tablet lol. Unadulterated image as taken off the tablet. I did shoot a few secs of video too but won't waste server space uploading that. Looking up I noticed the cloud had thinned briefly probably why the image is reasonably good. Nowt else tho as its all cloud here.

Edited September 29, 2023 by DaveL59

[DaveL59]

19 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

Agreed!  In direct sunlight I’d say with the black cover it wouldn’t be long getting hot inside. 

I was considering forming some sort of reflective cover (tin foil on card perhaps, its own tin foil hat lol) to shield it if using it for solar if that became an issue 😉 

[globular]

58 minutes ago, DaveL59 said:

So, station mode offers both 2.4 & 5 bands but seems your WiFi needs to be visible SSID, no option to add your hidden ones which all of mine are.

You could try temporarily unhiding your ssid so you can add it to the seestar. Then, once added and saved, hide it again.  It should connect again once added even if hidden.

 

[globular]

1 hour ago, DaveL59 said:

I'd need it to display the MAC also so I can authorize it which doesn't seem available in the app.

Again, you could temporarily disable mac authorisation while you add the seestar. You can then see the mac address on your router so you can turn authorisation back on and enter the correct mac address.

[powerlord]

Clouded up here. Moon between clouds is all I can get for the moment.

 

[powerlord]

Well, I'm afraid I only got about an hour between the clouds last night for first light with the S50.

So here's the results restacked from the fits in APP, and edited in affinity photo with Russell's filters.

NGC7023 Iris Nebula - 22 mins. I mean this is a tiny amount of integration time for this reflection nebula. I'm surprised any of the nebulosity has come out. AND it was a full moon last night.

 

And IC1396 Elephants Trunk. This one shot with the "LP" filter (a quite bround NB filter). Only 29 mins for that - again not much and I'd be interested to see what it'd be like with a few hours - of course by then you'd only really be getting those hours of integration into the centre circle though.

Overall, I'd say there's enough there to get a beginner interested in astophotography - and what above everything else, it has going for it is ease of use - no pointing it north, no start alignment - just stick it on ground, switch it on, and tell it a target - job done.

 

Edited September 30, 2023 by powerlord

[DaveL59]

9 minutes ago, powerlord said:

Well, I'm afraid I only got about an hour between the clouds last night for first light with the S50.

So here's the results restacked from the fits in APP, and edited in affinity photo with Russell's filters.

 

I'd be more than pleased to have got those images 🙂

Interested tho in the Russell's filters, are they available anywhere.

[powerlord]

29 minutes ago, DaveL59 said:

I'd be more than pleased to have got those images 🙂

Interested tho in the Russell's filters, are they available anywhere.

https://www.rc-astro.com/

 

[bf79]

Mine arrived yesterday and managed to get a wee break in the clouds so had a bit of fun with it. 
I have to say, if you look up the phrase “all the gear, no idea” you’ll find a picture of me as the definition, but this was really easy to set up and I was getting images in a couple of minutes. 
 

First I got some pictures of the moon which was pretty spectacular, though strangely enough the device struggled to find it by itself so I had to manually locate it which wasn't exactly a problem. 
 

 

I then had a quick go at some DSO targets, and  on the stargazing mode it had no problems at all automatically locating and centring any targets, and found everything first time. 
 
First up I tried Andromeda

 

Then the Cigar Galaxy 

 

 

Then Bodes Galaxy

 

 

Then the bubble Nebula

 

 

Then finished up with M39 cluster

 

 

Im really pleased with it. Its ridiculously easy to use, and its great to watch the images start to appear on the screen in front of you. It makes me want to get the finger out and learn how to properly use all the other astro kit thats sitting in my shed 🤣

I also need to learn how to edit my images so if anybody can recommend anything I can use on the phone / iPad it would be appreciated 

 

Brian

Edited September 30, 2023 by bf79

[Cosmic Geoff]

One thing I found is that while the deep sky images stored on the Seestar S50 are identified by directory and filename, those sent to the smartphone aren't.  (as of V1.71 and v1.21) Having taken over a dozen deepsky images for my 'first light'  I had to laboriously compare them all with the small jpeg thumbnails downloaded from the S50 in order to positively identify all the Iphone images.

Obviously with the Sun, Moon, and a few other things there is no problem identifying the image.🙂

Is there a better way of identifying them, or do I have to keep a note of the order in which the images are taken?

[DaveL59]

Digging around in my camera bits I located a 49mm lens cap that's low-ish profile, lower than most OEM ones at least. Clips in fine, but unfortunately not enough clearance when the moving section returns to park. It'd get almost there but not quite so that idea's a bust.

Also added a bit of copper tape on the sloped corner which hopefully will be reflective enough that I can see roughly where its pointing in near dark, might get some luminous tape if the idea works - could be handy on tripod legs too so as not to trip and stumble about in the dark 🙂 

[MalcolmP]

Recently I have been having a lot of fun with just a camera + vintage lenses on a tripod, but wasting a lot of imaging time finding where I am pointing in the sky, with more time the following day stacking and processing.
Then you all tempt me with a very interesting topic on this new-fangled S50 device
thanks to everyone for showing, very tempting indeed !

Just out of curiosity [my note taking in-situ is probably worse than Geoff's ] I ran a couple of  @bf79 Brian's through ASTAP and it IDed them from blind no bother :- reduced screen grabs so not best quality,

 

 

4 hours ago, bf79 said:

Cigar Galaxy ... M39 cluster

[jjohnson3803]

17 hours ago, powerlord said:

and after a quick tart up of the jpg

Just for grins, I ran your original pic through the default photo editor on my Windows laptop.  I'm not an imager, but it came out pretty nicely IMO.  Speaks well to the S* capabilities.

Edited September 30, 2023 by jjohnson3803

[DaveL59]

Out of interest folks, anyone figured out what this button does yet?

When tapped it turns green but can't say much happens and no slider appears as my first assumption was maybe its an EV adjust button.

[LDW1]

1 hour ago, jjohnson3803 said:

Just for grins, I ran your original pic through the default photo editor on my Windows laptop.  I'm not an imager, but it came out pretty nicely IMO.  Speaks well to the S* capabilities.

So let us have a look !

[DaveL59]

16 hours ago, globular said:

You could try temporarily unhiding your ssid so you can add it to the seestar. Then, once added and saved, hide it again.  It should connect again once added even if hidden.

 

 

16 hours ago, globular said:

Again, you could temporarily disable mac authorisation while you add the seestar. You can then see the mac address on your router so you can turn authorisation back on and enter the correct mac address.

Yep I know all this stuff pretty well and my router config. Wasted a good while today trying to get this to work and seems tablet android didn't allow me to connect to the WiFi where on the phone app it did. So yeah, set to not hidden and no MAC control and I got on OK. Updated the MAC tables and again it'll connect OK with MAC control turned back on. But once you re-hide the SSID you're done, it won't try to connect even tho it seemed to save the details just fine. So pretty pointless feature for anyone wanting some security on their network, one I won't be using anyway 😞 

Edited September 30, 2023 by DaveL59

[globular]

14 minutes ago, DaveL59 said:

But once you re-hide the SSID you're done, it won't try to connect even tho it seemed to save the details just fine.

Something for ZWO to fix then.
Was worth a try - sorry it took up so much time.