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I sometimes look through the images on Facebook. Why? Sometimes there's some pretty good images on the site. Although, most of the people are just looking for "likes." I was scrolling through some images and came across one of the best M42 and running man images I've ever seen in my lifetime of astrophotography, Now to be honest I have zero interest in these types of telescopes. But I could not believe how good this image was. Now I've imaged M42 many times over my astrophoto "career." and I've found M42 to be one of the most difficult. You know what I mean. Too long to get all the surrounding nebula, core is blown out. Too short, lose a lot of the surrounding nebula. So, a combination of both is needed. Still, not easy. Does anyone have any experience with these scopes? I wish I could copy and post the image here. I think even you advanced astrophotographers would be impressed. I think he claimed an hour of aquisition time with 60 second subs. My question is: Is it really possible to get this quality with a Seestar S50? I have to say no. I called the guy on it because I didn't see how he could get a huge amount of Ha and still a core that showed the trapezium. Also, the size of the field wasn't right for the Seestar. What's your take on these units? Mike |
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| Crap |
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| I will humbly have to disagree. If you look at my recent post of the Rosetta Nebula, I imaged this over 3 days with my S50. I stacked the image with APP and then did some modest cleanup in PI and Photoshop. I captures 2427 x 10" subs and I'm quite blown away that I can get something this good. It is not as good as what I can image with my big glass but... I can be imaging literally in less than a minute with my S50. On nights that might be "iffy" due to rain but at the moment it's clear I can get some nice pictures and if nothing else I have a bit better idea on targets to pursue on better nights. In the daytime it is my solar early warning system. To get my Lunt LS80MT running, if it's not currently on my mount I have a fair amount of work to do to set it up. It's nice to know there either is some activity (sunspots) or not before I go to all that trouble. I have friends and family over. My wifes favorite comment is she doesn't like to look at fuzzy splotches. ;-) On at least brighter things I can show here a nice detailed image first with my iPad and then show her in the eyepiece what we are looking at. Much nicer. On traveling you simply cannot beat one small box for a complete imaging setup that takes up little to no room in the back of the car. No, it will never be as good as big glass but for $500, IMHO, it is hard to beat what you can get. YMMV. |
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Can't comment on the particular image without seeing it, but with 10 second subs at its fixed gain it's definitely not blowing out the core and you can see the trapezium in a linear, unstretched image: And this is with one simple GHS stretch - note that this is only 3 minutes of data but it's not hard to see that you can push this a lot further with more exposure time. The GHS is key to preserving the core:  The build-in duo-narrowband "LP" filter is similar to the ZWO duo band, it's not the best but it definitely does the job of rejecting most unwanted signal, and with a recent low-read noise sensor (IMX462) getting the faint parts is just a matter of piling on the total integration time - which I don't bother with since my Seestar is purely an EAA machine for me, but I do think it's possible. Getting out both the inner core and the fainter outer parts thus is mostly a matter of processing skill, in itself I don't think the hardware is totally incapable of it. There's a lot to be said for short subs on a recent CMOS sensor, even if mechanically the SeeStar is mostly you-get-what-you-pay for (but good value IMHO). Now if the FoV doesn't match (too small) the poster cropped for field rotation, but if the pixel scale is wrong I'd smell a rat. |
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| You can‘t do 60s exposures with the Seestar (and even if you could it wouldn’t track well enough). It‘s a 50mm semi-apo with an IMX462C chip and an alt-az mount. The LP filter has a bandwidth of about 40nm. I‘m selling mine because I rather use my „real“ AP setups or do visual. |
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There is no "rat" in my post. You have a large, rectangular box that was rotated about 180 degrees to make my picture of Rosetta. Look at the description of my post and you can clearly see the raw stack from 2427 images, you get roughly a circle. I discuss this in my writeup. To this point, ZWO is activly working on a mosaic feature that essentially makes what I did moot but the point is if you take a LOT of rectangular images that are all rotated AND you stack it with APP, it will stack them and NOT crop them. You get the whole thing as stacked. While now 20s and 30s exposures are possible with the S50 you will get a lot of trails with these because there is no de-rotation. The S50 is not great on ALL objects but for some in the right position it does do an acceptable job, especially if you let it run long enough. The lack of rotation does affect the final image for sure. Because you can download all of the subs you can do a much better stacking yourself. The S50, due to how it works, ALWAYS uses the first image as the reference for stacking. This is not optimal and makes for noisy upper left and bottom right corner images. If you stack yourself you can pick a sub in the middle of the stack for reference and this cuts down significantly the noise in those two corners. |
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Phil Hoppes: Talking to OP and remarking on the suspect image he saw, hadn't even read or seen your post Phil |
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Benny Colyn:Phil Hoppes: Ah ok. Thanks for the clarification. |
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| Either you do it right or you don't do it all, this is my view on the matter. And, frankly, I wouldn't spend 6-odd hours shooting and who knows how many more processing 2427 images for a target such as NGC2244. Can it produce images: sure. Are they worth the price/effort: I doubt it. |
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Mike H: Without the picture it is hard to say but I think it was legit. I got very good results with the Seestar on M42 with very careful post-processing of the raw data to not blown out the core, using 10s exposure and the dual band integrated filter. I do not consider myself as an expert and I have seen much better results than mine with the Seestar that does not seems at all unrealistic. https://astrob.in/y9c9w1/B/ This requires very specific stretching on M42, I do the post processing in 3 layers : one for the stars. one for the higlights and one for the rest of the picture then I recombine the 3. Theorically you can do that with a very good stretch but I find it easier this way. Regarding the fov I was also able to get a slightly higher fov (let's say 50% higher) than the native one by just stacking sessions with slightly different center point with the proper option in Siril. I heard that with Astro Pixel Processor you can produce proper mosaics with the Seestar data. Of course you cannot really obtain this kind of result with the Seestar mobile app without re-stacking / post processing of the sub exposures on a computer. |
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I have a Seestar S50 and learning to use Siril. Out of the box with 10, 20 or 30sec i get very good images depending on how high the images are there are not to much rotation. This is a short 10sec "exposure" for 14min. https://cdn.astrobin.com/images/254974/2024/0537f4b1-dfa6-4bc1-a613-458c84df867f.jpg Even if i'm not good (yet) to post prosess the FITS in Siril i get better stacked images than the inbuilt. And yes it could probably be better with more images or use several nights and stack together when i learn howto. But this is my second image. My first was the M27. And we are waiting for a mosaic mode for the app and ZWO is making the app better for each new firmware. So its not crap i have more success with this scope than my regular with the atx celestron tracker. And i know that i cannot get 8K images etc. But its a great scope that for someone is good enough and for others it might kickstart the hoppy to get an even better scope. And for people saying its crap they dont know what they are talking about or they compare apples with oranges.. |
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Especially here, So-called serious astrophiles gladly denigrate this new generation of telescopes, calling them toys, or little more. But these instruments will be the future, remember. I normally use a 40 cm Newton for planetary photography. But I got the Seestar to do some deep sky and sun photography anyway. Like many at this time, I have been shooting M42. Only 40 minutes of integration, 20-second subs, processing in Pixisight, Siril and PS. If toys work like this, welcome toys.  |
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Phil Hoppes: Hilarious, I've been using the seestar the same way. https://www.astrobin.com/full/nd1dxz/0/?real= This is 50 hours but broken up into 9 smaller straight cropped stacks, thus wasting a HUGE amount of data. I'm drizzling 3x 100 hours of integration but struggling with processing the large frames in a meaningful number on pixinsight. What is your upper limitation on frames with APP? Sorry if I'm hijacking this, but this style of astrophotography is not discussed very much. I've got 35,000 10 second exposures on rosette that I'm dying to figure out. |
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| Awesome image @Karl-Heinz Macek . Nicely done. |
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Regulus Remains: It took me I think about 2 - 3 hours to let APP stack it. I've not used APP much before but I was aware how well it did especially on stacking rotated images and making mosaic images. I tried a few things to get the hang of it and then just loaded it all in and let it rip. At that point it's just wall clock time. Cleaning up the final image in PI was a snap as it is just a dynamic crop and go with my normal OSC workflow. I actually had 3 more days of images as with the S50 it doesn't take a lot of time to take 4-6 hours of pictures. Set it up and go and then go play with my big glass or head to bed. Anyway I had close to 5000 subs with my other days. That turned out to be a bit of a bust as I was lazy and didn't want to "blink" 3000 more frames. I should have as some of the bad ones made for some fuzzy spots. There is no free lunch you have to do the work and with LOTS of subs it does take more time. At this point in time I was just throwing stuff in as I had no idea how it would work. For me it came out much better than I expected so now I've got a bit of incentive to see just how I can tweak it to do better. Not everyone is going to like it. Pick a telescope on CN. ANY telescope. You will have a nice distribution of lovers and haters. That, IMHO, is a worthless discussion. Check the positives and check the negatives. If it doesn't work for you fine. Get something else. If it does, fine, chat with other users and see how you can do better. I don't get the animosity. APP is a nice but strange app. There is like, ZERO documentation which is my biggest pet peeve with using it. On the plus side there is a plethora of YouTube and I was quickly able to be up and running with it viewing these. Charles Bracken of Astrophotography fame also uses it and has written a nice quick user guide. This was also very helpful. Your question on upper limitation I think is just how long do you want your PC tied up stacking. ;-). The 5000 sub run took probably 6-8 hours to stack. I did a couple of things that made it slower than necessary. I had the subs stored on an external SSD drive. In 20/20 hind sight it probably would have run faster if ALL the data was on my Mac's internal solid state drive. There are probably a few things to tweak with the app to make it faster too but I'd have to search the user forum to probably find it. |
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andrea tasselli: Do you even own one to make such a comment. |
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| The OP didn't request any proof of ownership to comment on these "things". My comment stands. |
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I wish I could post the image here. I'm guessing copying his image and posting would be a violation of his rights. You have to see it to believe it. I'll look to see if he posted it anywhere that I could put a link up. It's on the ZWO owners page on Facebook which you have to be a member of to view. Guys, I didn't post this to start an argument. I just wanted some comments from owners to see if this type of image quality was possible because I said no from the time I saw it. So I'm open to being wrong in my opinion of it. It's just $499 is so cheap. Who of us isn't using $15,000 worth of equipment? That's not including my small observatory. Mike |
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| Hi @Mike H. I have both a Seestar (and a Dwarf II smartscope ), and big expensive rigs including a very high quality 10 inch carbon tube CDK (Corrected Dall Kirkham) on a high precision 10Micron GM1000 HPS mount ( a well over $25,000 rig), and I'm impressed particularly by my Seestar's optics for the incredibly low price. The Seestar mount though is VERY sloppy/backlashy, but with 10 sec exposures it still works well enough even though about half of its exposures don't have round enough stars for me to want to stack. I've been getting some very nice images from my Seestar even with the limitation of all those thrown in the trash-bin exposures, such as this one of NGC 253, the Sculptor or Silver Dollar galaxy, with the Seestar's saved 10 sec FITs individual exposures stacked in Astro Pixel processor and Processed in Pixinsight. This was about 1.25 hours of usable round-star exposures from a 2.5 hour session. It is a bright and large galaxy which was easygoing on the Seestar's ability but it did give an I think very nice image. https://www.astrobin.com/kewu2e/ I've also resolved a 17.2 mag , faint and red, 12 billion ly distant quasar with it https://www.astrobin.com/httbzh/ , and got a somewhat ok image of Uranus and two of its moons with the Seestar https://www.astrobin.com/3qvxot/ . It's amazing what an optically fairly decent 50/250mm scope can provide, and I think ZWO are to be commended to be doing it at this sort of stunning price level. I think these types of smartscope will be the future of consumer astrophotography. I love using my Seestar, and my Dwarf II, alongside my big expensive rigs. |
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This is M42 imaged for 40 mins. https://www.astrobin.com/full/jk48bo/0/ It was the jpeg image already stacked which I processed in Pixinsight. You can see the Trapesium Cluster so not bad for a small scope. I've now processed the fits files so the image is even better, the plane trail has now gone |
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Mike H: Is it this one from Christian Fiore? https://www.facebook.com/share/p/jhwAfHfz2YtNuuBe/?mibextid=WC7FNe This is a good result but totally credible. |
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I do not think it is a toy. I think it is a very streamlined and portable setup with very good value for money, especially compared to the other smart telescopes out there. I also think its main use case is EAA, but you can get some pretty good results on bright (and even not-so-bright) objects with minimal effort and that is important. One comment though: the Trapezium is about 20x45 arcseconds across. Perfectly within the resolving capabilities of an instrument with 50mm aperture (~2.5 arcseconds). Or even an instrument half as large, although that would be pushing it. The Uranus system is about the same size so again, perfectly possible to split with a 50/250 scope. As long as the camera has small enough pixels (which the ASI462 has). IMO the take home lesson here is you can go a really long way with a small refractor and a modern CMOS camera. The Seestar package simply makes sure the setup delivers close to 100% of its potential (focusing, appropriate gain/exposure selection, filter changes etc). Cheers, Dimitris |
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That's not it Nicolas but very impressive. Mike |
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I own and love the SeeStar S50. At the moment I have physical limitations due to post corona issues and the lightweight setup keeps me connected to astro photography. However, the physical limitations of astro photography still apply. Therefore you won't get a record breaking image with 1h of integration time, a 50mm lens diameter and an uncooled sensor even in a great bortle zone. These days you can get a lot of improvements by software but it still won't beat a bigger scope with a better sensor and more integration time under the same conditions. Within its limitations it's still a capable piece of equipment and very easy to use. The only thing I don`t like is that the stacking mechanism drops a lot of frames, so you lose 20% or more of integration time. Best regards Wolfgang |
