Just got my new Seestar S50 robotic telescope. For such a little beast, it packs a whallop!

M13 was imaged for a bit less than 3 minutes (16 x 10s subs) using the built-in sky filter, and the resulting JPEG had a strong blue tinge. So I imported the raw Bayered frames of the subs and did my own deBayering, drizzle alignment and stacking, then color corrected against the GAIA database, using PixInsight. The result, shown here, is actually noticeably reddish in hue, owing to the large number of Population II metal-poor ancient stars making up the cluster.

I am seriously impressed by what that little Seestar S50 can do in just a few minutes, with hardly any setup time involved. Just get close to level, let it take a dark frame, and then have at it until you decide to stop the image stacking.

The only irritation I had last night was the fact that the iPhone app doesn't allow for direct coordinate entry with RA and Dec. That means we have to go back 50 years to before when the big telescopes got computer controlled pointing and tracking. (I was the first grad student on the world's first computer-controlled telescope, 1977, the Wyoming 100 inch Infrared Telescope). Back then we had to learn how to "star hop" using sky charts we traced out on tissue paper from the old Bonner Durchmusterung charts, and the Palomar Sky Survey photos under a stereo microscope. We used tissue paper for our pencilled charts so that we could turn them upside down and shine a flashlight from the backside to see what our eyepiece view should show when we finally reach the target area.

ZWO assures me via e-mail that they intend to have direct coordinate entry soon... But it was kind of fun, in addition to being irritating, last night. It brought back many memories of the early days atop Mt. Lemmon and the U.Minn metal-mirror 90-inch telescope that we often used for our IR observations.

Going to well known objects like M13 is a breeze on the Seestar S50 because it has a nice catalog of all the goodies in the sky. What it doesn't have are objects like 3C273, which took 3 attempts to capture last night. I finally nailed it near the image center, but you are racing the movement in Az/El against the tilted RA & Dec axes. Left/Right movement does not correspond to RA and Dec with an AltAz mount.