Community Archive

actually, these are 2 of the best Saturn pics I've seen from an S50 :) Planets just simply require longer focal lengths; you can't really cheat the physics on this. Unless there's a dramatically new form factor, or a real technological breakthrough (we've been using the same basic technology for about 400 years), I don't expect much better planetary imagery from smart telescopes.

In my understanding, if your in EQ mode, leveling doesn't impact tracking accuracy performance; all that matters then is how well you've polar aligned. Leveling does, however, affect the polar alignment process. when you do the adjustments required for polar alignment, you have to adjust the Y-axis to tweak the altitude angle, and X-axis to tweak azimuth, so that your scope is ultimately aligned with the equatorial pole. If your mount isn't level, then adjustments you make to one axis will also potentially register on the other. It's absolutely possible to still reach acceptable polar alignment, but it will likely take longer, and be more frustrating. If you can, an alternative is to level your tripod once, then do your best to anchor it in place: I place them on concrete pavers, then add vibration pads, and add weights to a hanging basket, then also add ankle weights to the legs. Then mount your EQ wedge. then, add your telescope and complete polar alignment. Now, your Tripod and the EQ wedge are aligned- leave it out! use an arca-swiss or vixen adapter to mount your telescopes each night, and if all goes well, you'll be very close to polar aligned without touching anything... you might have to make minor adjustments at most. I can normally get 4 scopes up and running in <10 minutes with practically perfect polar alignment.

OH, I completely forgot to mention: yes, Siril is awesome, but StackingWizard/AstroWizard have been producing amazing results in our community, and have a much easier learning curve than AstroWizard. if your looking for something with more integrity than ChatGPT, and more advanced than the Seestar editing capabilities, but easier than Siril, then Absolutely give the Wizard suite a look (https://astrowizard.lukomatico.com). It also works with the same RC-Astro tools, so you can start off completely free, buy RC-Astro when your ready, and then transition to Siril if you want to do things beyond what the Wizard can do.

FITs files are pretty straightforward- your file size, either for subs or stacked images, are pretty predictable: it’s basically length x width x channels x pixel depth. Mosaic and drizzle both increase the length/width of your image. Channels is slightly more complex- the most raw version of your data would only be 1 channel per sensor pixel, and an accompanying bayer mapping would reconcile which channel (r,g,b) each sensor pixel maps to. Finally, pixel depth determines the level of gradation that each pixel can represent. 32 bit is 2x the size of 16 bit. So…. S50 raw FITs are 1920x1080x1 channel x 16bit depth, which is about 4MB. 1920*1080*1*16=33,177,600 bits, 33,177,600/8=4,147,200 bytes. Take that, and *just* convert it to a processed file with debayering and 32 bits: 1920*1080*3*32=199,065,600/8=24,883,200 and we’re up to 24 MB. It’s slightly harder to estimate exactly how much additional length the and width the mosaic adds, because a 2x mosaic, with rotation, can involve many additional panels- it’s never a simple 2x2 with overlap- and whatever you land on, drizzle will scale that by your drizzle factor, and you can get up to gigs quickly.

I've built a feature in AstroGuide specifically to answer questions like this :) it's called Sky Captures; you can give it an iPhone night-mode photo, and it will plate solve it on device and give you an interactive explorer, to see all the subjects that landed in the frame of your image, then give you a sharable, annotated version of the image. The feature is in Beta now, but will hopefully be released in the main version of the app in a few days. DM me if you want access to the TestFlight beta :)

Well, the good news is your gear, technique, and overall practice seems solid. The missing ingredient might be Hydrogen Alpha :) HA is the emission band that makes most nebula images pop; most of the time, astrophotographers use a HA filter to isolate this wavelength and reveal nebulosity. It isn’t strictly required, but if often helps, especially in bright light polluted skies. One challenge, though, is that it’s deep in the “red” end of the spectrum, and some cameras actually cut off part of these wavelengths with their internal filters. If so, your camera might require an Astro modification. I’ve attached my most recent results from the andromeda region; this was an Astro-modded Nikon D5300, with an Askar FMA135, 300 second exposures, iso 800, Bortle 4-5-ish.

[person] you generally always want the longest exposure your gear can handle without rejecting frames. Frame rejection comes from star trails, which are the result of 1.) inaccurate polar alignment (in EQ) or leveling (in alt/az), 2.) target position (too low for EQ, too high for alt/az), or 3. any kind of movement (caused by wind, vibration, etc). If you properly align, and then stabilize your tripod using weights and/or vibration pads, you should be able to easily get 30-60s subs, especially with s50 pro.

For a broadband subject like Andromeda, choosing a night with minimal lunar interference makes a huge difference. As others have said, the more time the better, but not all minutes are created equal- try to avoid capturing data when your subject is below ~30 degrees, otherwise the airmass will compromise your signal. https://astroguide.space has tools to help you figure out the best exposure and integration times based on your gear, location, conditions, and subject.

can't wait to hear about your results- as others have pointed out, there are some things about your setup that raise eyebrows, but I think this can be a good learning experience for all of us. first, I would absolutely have sequenced it as tripod->leveler->fluid head->seestar. Also, I don't see any benefit to having the battery pack attached to the seestar itself; the gears have been tested to operated properly with known weight, and you're introducing potential imbalances. Third: raising the center column of your tripod like that reduces stability, and makes your device more susceptible to wind, for very little payoff- unless your very close to obstructions, like a fence, the extra few inches of height shouldn't really materially impact your visibility (and if so, moving back a few inches from the obstruction would accomplish the same geometric benefit). All that being said, your results will speak for themselves- please come back and let us know how things worked out!

I'm thinking I might have my S30 Pro do a timelapse, really just focused on the moon, and we'll see if Jupiter is at all visible... then have the S50 at 8x zoom tracking Jupiter as it approaches... then, hopefully, also get my Celestron 6" doing lucky imaging of Jupiter. basically, I'm throwing practically everything I have at this :D

[person] ok so you've clearly made up your mind about Seestars, and that's fine. I've had a different experience. I've used my Seestar over 130 nights this year, and have completed thousands of sessions. I would strongly recommend anyone get one, regardless of what other telescopes they have. we're going to have to agree to disagree here.

[person] I’ve actually recently gone down this exact path- I’ve recently bought a .63x reducer ($150) for my Celestron 6”, an ASI662MC ($180), and I have an ASIAir. (There are less expensive options, but at least $200?). We’re at over $500, and we haven’t added the other components that come straight out of the box with a Seestar: an EAF, a basic filter wheel, an LP filter, and a dew heater. Then there’s the cost in terms of time setting it all up. Yes, the optics of a traditional telescope are absolutely better, and the flexibility is a huge advantage- but the economics of smart telescopes can’t be beat.

Get the Seestar. It’s the last expensive way to “trial” astrophotography- you need to evaluate your observation site, your desire for planning, your capacity for post processing, and where you ultimately want your budget to land. You can accomplish that for less than 1k, and either keep the Seestar as a travel/scout/survey scope, or sell it to get back most of your investment. There’s no downside.

First of all, this looks great! one thing that might save you a bunch of work next time: Siril has a brightness-weighted HDR script that automates almost exactly what you did manually in Photoshop. Stack each exposure length separately, then put three of the resulting FITS files by themselves in an empty folder. They have to be named long.fit, medium.fit, short.fit. Set that folder to your working directory, then Run WAF-HDR_brightness_weighted and it will register them, crop them to their common area, and automatically blend the shorter exposure into bright areas like the Trapezium/core while preserving the faint nebulosity from the longer exposure. Since you have four exposure lengths, I’d probably start with 120 seconds as long, 30 seconds as medium, and maybe stack the 1 and 3 seconds as `short`… try them separately as well, see what works best. m42 is basically the perfect use case for this :)

how have you tried so far? which tools are you using? the most straightforward way to accomplish this is to use the Nazstronomy OSC script in Siril; you can just drag the S30Pro and S50Pro images into separate sessions, and the script will handle the rest: stack the subs individually for each instrument, plate solve/align/register them, get them to the same pixel density, and then stack the masters from each session. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prU1w4W5IbE

[person] that someone might have been me 🤣 I bought about 6 different teleconverters, And tried to use them with my s50 and s30 pro. Could never get an adequate focus. The optics of the Seestars are already optimized for their focal length- doing anything to try to materially change them will generally not work out. One other dude successfully put a 2x teleconverter on his s30 (non pro), and was able to use it, but that same teleconverter didn’t work with the s50 or s30 pro.

In Siril, check the sliders at the bottom of the screen- they govern how Siril shows the image on your particular monitor. Generally, you want the top all the way right, and the bottom all the way left. Also, it’s possible you stayed in auto-stretch mode and did additional processing. After the stretch step, make sure you switch to linear.

Congrats on taking the next step on your journey :) the seestars are amazing instruments, and you can really unlock them with full scale software on a computer. The new wizard tools are a great way to get started, and I’m excited to see how they will evolve. Siril is incredibly powerful, and also free, and of course pixinsight is considered the gold standard. The dust regions in this image look great-the software did great with the data you captured!

thanks for this thoughtful feedback- these are absolutely issues that i've been working through over the past few months. two of the issues you've raised (2 and 5) are really related to the same underlying challenge: there are many functional areas of the app, and limited available real estate for navigation. the major sections of the app are: Tonight Goals, Sites, Equipment, History, Solar system, Seasons, Settings, Search and then also competing for navigation space: Site and Kit quick switchers, date picker on tonight screen tonight, schedule gadget so, about 12 different UX elements, but the navigation is constrained to only showing about 7-8, or less, depending on screen size. i can fit 4 main navigation items in the bottom toolbar (plus search, which is fixed to a standard position), and then 2-3 additional items in the top toolbars; one toolbar position has to be for the "overflow" area, and then everything else lands there. i've explored trying to combine areas (sites+equipment, goals+history, solar system+seasons, etc), but it felt like it was harder to find functionality. for the night rating icons (issue 1): from an accessibility standpoint, its best practice to only use color to indicate important information; using standard emoji was meant to help with that. in general, i tried to have the emoji quickly communicate go/no go. (anything with a star is "go", anything without a star is "no go"), but then I somewhat intentionally softed the hard 3/4/5 ratings that exist under the hood: a "3" night can be just as good as a "5" night, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. The remaining items are (3 and 4) are much more straight forward; i can absolutely improve the "new schedule" experience, and i can find ways to have better defaults for the starting observation time. Part of this is my own learning; as i'm becoming more active as an astrophotographer, i'm learning that "first usable light" really changes alot throughout the year.

hi! I haven't gotten around to creating a guide yet, but I'll try to make that a priority soon. ok: - you can have as many schedules as you want, and 1 schedule can be associated with 1 kit at a time. - when you switch kits on the Home Screen, it switches to the schedule associated with that kit; the intention is to make it easy to switch between planning for different kits. - in my experience, its very hard to plan on exactly whats going to happen on a given night in the future; its hard to decide precisely what your going to do next Tuesday, given how conditions change. so, you can look at any of your schedules, and you can preview how that schedule will look for each night in the 10 night forecast; as you click on different nights, the schedule will adjust to show the paths of the chosen subjects *on those nights*. it will also show the conditions/observation windows, but take those with a grain of salt, because of course conditions will change. - you can also switch between different sites; if you know your going to be at a different location, you can switch the site, and it will show the schedule from the perspective of that site. if you want to better understand a subjects visibility for a future night, there are a few affordances for that: - on a subjects detail screen, you can see its monthly visibility; if you tap a month, it will show you the hourly visibility for that subject for the middle of the selected month. if you tap and hold on the month, you can choose a specific date, and see the corresponding visibility. - another useful tool is the sky map view: tap the full screen button on the path preview, then choose either sky map or sky sphere. this will show you a diorama of your observation site, and let you see the position of hundreds of deep sky objects throughout the night. in these views, you can choose a future date and see the paths your favorite subjects will take on that night.

This conversation keeps on coming up, but there’s actually always more to add to it :) total integration time is super important, but it’s far from the only determinant of image quality. I would much rather have 1 hour of Bortle 1 data than 20 hours of Bortle 9 data. Yes, adding more integration time is generally always good, even with diminishing returns… but focus on more this. Just maximizing integration. Try to focus on maximizing high value data, when conditions are clear and your subject is in its best position for your sky.

[person] what I normally do is essentially branch the data before doing the actual nebula processing; like, I’ll save off a copy (let’s call it “baseline”), and then do all my nebula processing and ultimately save a fully processed, starless image. Then I’ll go back to baseline, and reprocess more aggressively just for the stars- so SPCC, more aggressive blurXterminator, noiseX, and green noise reduction, all with stars still present. The. I’ll run starX, and combine the star mask that created with the starless nebula I had previously processed.

Leonard Ward disable. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that filters are like sunglasses for your camera- they work exclusively by blocking specific wavelengths of light. Using both the LP and an external filter like Optolong is not going to provide “more HA and OIII”, it’s just going to (at best) provide less light overall, and (most likely) reduce the signal you actually want, if the different costing from the different filters don’t interact up just right.

There really shouldn’t be a general consensus :) this is going to be completely contextual- star trails are the result of anything that interferes with tracking, and that list of things is long and context dependent. To avoid dropped frames In alt/az, your going to need accurate level alignment, excellent leveling, a steady tripod deployment that’s shielded from vibration, clear skies, no clouds, and a subject that’s not too high in the sky. If you can check all of those checkboxes, you should be able to reliably do 30s subs. Each one of those that aren’t ideal will increase the likely of dropped frames (either because of star trails or not enough stars).

yeah I was thinking that the rotator is a useful tool for framing, and could be a good improvement to reduce field rotation in alt/az, but its not a replacement for actual EQ Mode (or telescopes would have been doing this for decades). alt/az with rotating camera is 3 different motors running in perfect synchronization for the entire session. EQ mode is (essentially) just the RA motor engaged.

If you use Siril, especially with the Nazstronomy OSC script, it will handle all of this for you; Siril is capable of resampling all of the images to the same pixel density, and Naz’s script will simplify the session/stack management. I would recommend treating each camera/night as its own session in the script, and let it take care of normalizing everything into a single master stack. Though it would technically work, having one scope in alt/az and the other in EQ mode is probably going to lead to some weird noise. With the smaller FOV in alt/az, the portions of the frames that overlap the least are going to now overlap with the clean portions of the s50 pro FOV. It’s worth a shot, but you might end up with a nice clean center region, and then a halo of increased noise where the field rotation portion of the s50 frame is.

unpopular opinion: Telescopes are relatively useless without a tripod, a mount, a focuser, a filter wheel, an EAF, a camera, a wifi enabled controller, a dew heater, a power supply, cable management, stacking software, library management software, and editing software. its pretty amazing that smart scopes can deliver all of that for the same price most folks (including me) pay for glass and a tube. 💅🏻

[person] funny story: I tried capturing Saturn the other night, and it wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened 😂 I actually kinda dig the results, and want to try it again with my s50 (this was my s30 pro). I completely understand that other devices will get me better results (I’m building one out), but I still like seeing what I can accomplish with smart telescopes. It sure would be nice if we could set per-subject settings for each target in a plan, would t it be? 🫠

I've spent the last 6 months talking about how much better it was to create homogenous stacks for each session, and then stack-the-stacks. my understanding was (is?) that this lets you isolate issues like gradients, transparency differences, lunar interference, etc, and then combine the best of your data in the final master stacking. 💪🏻 Then the literal author of Siril told me, in no ambiguous terms, that you will get better results from doing a monolithic stack every single time. 🤡 I'm still experimenting with both ways. In my personal experience, I see slightly better results (In terms of lower noise per channel and better FWHM), and faster performance, by doing the stack-of-stacks/master stacking approach. For me, personally, doing the monolithic stack takes longer, uses more ram/disk space, often crashes, and produces results that are +/- 5% of the stack-of-stacks approach. now, I have absolutely no doubt that [person] was correct in his assertion... so my assumption is that the monolithic approach produces better results *assuming really good data, or assuming enough computing power to handle tons of data*. My data, on the other hand, is decent at best, and often pretty bad. I think the tower-stacking approach does a better job of making a decent stack out of subpar data, while the monolithic approach makes an exceptional stack out of very good data.

this is a really nice capture!! I've never used the Vaonis, but I've heard the multi-night capture is really great. for my image, I've done some pretty considerable pre- and post- processing, beyond what the vespera is going to do automatically; mainly, I utilized an HDR process to stack sessions of different exposure lengths to minimize blown out areas, and I used a different narrowband filter to capture sulfur data, then remapped the channels from the HA/OIII and SII/OIII filters to approximate a Hubble palette.

[person] from 52 north, M16 would be pretty low on your horizon. for individual subs, these honestly don't look that bad? also, I've noticed your doing Mosaics- there's significantly more wholesale movement in a mosaic. this might be indicating some minor backlash after the camera repositions? there are lots of confounding variables here. I wouldn't be too worried about a misaligned sensor. Tonight, choose a nice, really high subject- Elephant Trunk might be just right for this, or maybe NGC7000. get PA as close to 0:0 as possible, and do 3 hours of 30 sec subs, without mosaic. stack that, check your results. I predict reasonable star shapes.

one of the main benefits of Star Removal is that you can stretch your nebulosity more aggressively than your stars; I would recommend star removal first, then do your stretching of the background. you might not need the second BGE. I've considered automating this as well... and actually, AstroWizard is gaining tons of popularity as a tool that does a great job at automating this workflow. I often find, though, that at least with my data as messy as it is, there are still plenty of manual steps, tunings, and recycles that I want to do along the way. the Workflow Companion script from DSA has given me more productivity value than the time I've spent trying to automate this workflow- I can plow through the basics in just a few minutes now, and then spend hours obsessing on things no one else will ever notice :D Maybe after I've been doing this for 5 years, I'll be knowledgeable enough to turn this into a 1-click magic button, but for now, I'm putting in the time learning the tools.

A few additional questions: - How many subs in these pics? - Can you share images from individual subs as well? - can you share some pics of your setup, including where it was deployed? - what’s your approximate latitude? - what time was each session? It’s entirely possible that, like you said, you hate a unit with a misaligned sensor, or some other defect from assembly. There are also a dozen other things that could cause minor elongation of stars during 60 second subs. Eagle (orange) and bubble (blue) had very different altitude profiles last night (to be adjusted based on your latitude), and they also had meridian flips. A misaligned sensor is often going to produce different symptoms than uniform star trails and a consistent gradient.

ok, this is going to be a little weird, but I just wanted to document this :D I've been writing this "feature request" posts for a few months... I have a git repo where I keep drafts of them, and I edit them as I come up with ideas, or see enough folks talking about things. I started one 2 months ago to keep track of hardware requests that I had been thinking up for the next generation of seestars; I was was ready to flesh it out, but then the s50 came out, and I thought it wasn't the right time to request a whole different set of features.... but geez, the list that I had sure would be nice... it include Auto Guiding, a camera rotator, and some sort of built in SHO capabilities:D sound familiar? :O

[person] also, I try not to think of it as "running a risk". if I said I wanted to weight by FHWM, and 10s subs have better FHWM, and then they get higher weights, well, I guess thats what I asked for :D I tend to run the stacks all 3 ways, then look at the noise readings, aberration inspector, and general visual quality, then pick the best one. when doing stack-of-stacks, the master stack is usually just a handful of frames, so that part can go pretty quickly.

so, for targets that are potentially HDR, I create homogenous stacks by sub length, and then use an HDR blending script to take those stacks and blend them into a single image; that script looks at the brightest sub, and tries to find more detailed areas in the blown out portions of each successively less exposed sub (basically). for non HDR targets, I've been stacking each individual session first, then stacking those stacked subs into a final master. most of my data is from seestars, which honestly are pretty noisy- so I often do noise weighting, at both stages, to try to maximize the noise reduction. I've recently heard, though, from a pretty good authority, that the "stack of stacks" approach might not be ideal, so I've been experimenting with the mega-stack approach, and honestly haven't seen a huge difference in quality (despite it taking much, much longer).

this coloring is based on mapping the light that interacted with Sulfur, Hydrogen Alpha, and Oxygen to Red, Green, and Blue, with some adjustments to the sulfur and hydrogen channels to compensate for the inability to do longer subs with my SII filter. its kinda weird that you associated gender with a tremendous cloud of gas and star formation.

[person] when Siril does stacking, it has a few things it can automatically use for weighting: star count, noise, and FWHM, which is a measure of sharpness. Those are the things you actually want to influence your stacking weight- it’s a good hypothesis that exposure length will correlate with those, but it’s not a guarantee. You can have pristine 10 second subs and noise 60 second subs.

There are two ways (at least?) that mixed sub lengths are beneficial. First, the simple way: more integration time is better, basically in all scenarios, longer subs are generally always better, and the max sub length you can capture on any given night is based on conditions. If 20s is the best you can capture (without dropping excessive frames due to star trails) one night, but in another night you can do 60, then that’s the data you have, and you should absolutely stack it. Now, the more nuanced answer: longer subs will be more saturated and capture finer detail: shorter subs *could* capture extremely bright areas without over saturating or “blowing out” detail. So, if you have a subject with a very wide range of brightness , then capturing different subs allows you utilize High Dynamic Range techniques during post processing. Finally: yes, sub time matters. 100 subs at 60 seconds each is *not* the same as 600 subs at 10 seconds each, even though they both equal the same total integration. There are (at least) 2 factors at play: first, every camera incurs “read noise”, when it saves each sub. The longer your sub, the less overall read noise you have. Second, think of the photoreceptors on your sensor as little wells, that can “fill up” with photons. The longer your sub, the more your letting those wells fill uo. Too long, and you are at risk of completely saturating a well, and any additional photons will be lost. There’s also a minimum, though- too short, and not enough photons might land in the well to even register. Finally, shorter subs means *more* subs, and the file size of each sub is constant for your camera… a 1s sub is the same size as a 5 minute sub. So, shorter subs take up more disk space, and lead to more processing during stacking.

[person] coming from a photographer background, I understand the confusion- luckily, you *do not* have to keep your telescope in the same spot… instead, the nebula stays in the same spot 🙃 actually, your telescope is moving…. It’s on a planet that’s rotating, while also orbiting around its sun- so your mount, compensates by aligning to our celestial pole and then countering the motion of the earth. You can take your sub exposures from anywhere, and software will use the stars in the image to align each frame and stack the data to create something analogous to a ln 18 hour exposure. My best results aren’t as impressive as [person], but I’ve been able to use my silly Seestar to stack almost 14 hours of data from multiple sessions, from multiple nights, even from different telescopes (s50 and s30 pro) Into this composite, and I’m not done yet. I’m going to collect more data, and as I do, more detail will emerge.

Compared to your traditional rigs, but are orders of magnitude more portable, and easier to user in general- you’ll be capturing data in minutes. The Seestars are amazing: they combine 2 complete imaging trains (optics, camera, EAF), a filter wheel, power management, dew heater, and a controller in a single package along with easy to use software that includes sky catalog, planning, and basic and advanced editing. What’s missing, compared to traditional rigs, is cooling, guiding, and the flexibility of higher aperture and longer focal lengths. Both Pro models will give you excellent results on NGC 7000, Andromeda, Orion, wizard, bubble, crescent, M81/M83, M51, helix, etc; but if you want to go smaller (ring nebula) your stretching the limits of what S50 can do, and if you want to go larger (Veil, spaghetti, etc) you’ll need to do Mosaics.

folks: I'm dream casting future rigs, and I have a question that I'm wondering if folks here can help out with. If I were to get an AOG, can I put my filter drawer *after* the OAG in the imaging train? like port->reducer->extenders->OAG->filter drawer->Camera? I'm concerned about having to try to guide through narrowband filters, and just placing the OAG in front of them seems too easy- will that just work? help me out, I still have a lot to learn here :D

I do have the reducer- But I think I need to find a local SCT whisperer :P last time I tried to use it, I ended up with these unusual, arrow-like star shapes. I think something is out of alignment in my visual train, or I have a collimation issue. Based on YouTube videos I've been watching, my understanding is that the SVBONY MK127 is more resilient than older SCTs...

the IMX585 sensor in the Pro has the same pixel scale as the IMG462 in the S50 (2.39:/px), but 2x the resolution (3840x2160 vs 1920x1080). if all else (aperture/FL) stays constant, then the Pro will have the exact same sampling/resolution as the S50, just over 4x the area; your essentially getting the equivalent of a 2x2 mosaic, without paying the cost in terms of integration time or stitching headaches. cropping the S50 pro to the same FOV as the S50 would produce very comparable results.

I have great news for you: turns out your image *actually is* an unfinished mosaic :) the reason the 'corners are never completed' is because the telescope is intentionally dithering periodically (adjusting the center point of the frame slightly), to create overlap in the subs which are then used by dithering to infer sub-pixel data and increase the resolution of your image. the Naz script is giving you every single pixel from the subs; Seestar automatically applies a crop to remove the rough edges. in your scripts, when you "applyreg", thats "registering" every frame to a master reference point; it can then either crop every frame to that master (framing=current), or crop to the maximum bounds (framing=maximum). the Naz script is explicitly giving you the maximum framing- I'm guessing the default was cropping to the master frame. You have the privilege of applying your own crop now :P neither of these data sets "need" drizzle; it's an option you always have to interpolate additional detail into your images.

[person] yes, it’s technically higher resolution, but the s50s has better pixel density (and the s50 pro is even tighter). The s30pro spreads 8.3 megapixels over an area of sky that’s about 9 degrees (2.99x2.24 degrees), which is 3.74 arcsec/pixel. The s50 1/4 as many pixels (2.1 megapixels), but its area is less than 1/4 the area is the s30 pro- its only .94 degrees (1.29x.73 degrees), 2.4 arcsec/pixel. So, for the same patch of sky (either native on the s50 or cropped in with the s30 pro), you get over 1.5 as many pixels with the s50. Now, the s50 is literally the best of both worlds: you get the aperture and focal length of the s50 with the same sensor as the s30 pro. The result is the same s50 pixel density, but over twice the area: you get the equivalent of a 2x mosaic in each frame.

[person] this is *mostly* free software- I use Siri for everything, but for these images, I absolutely used the RC-Astro plugins, which aren’t free (but are still less expensive than pixinsight). BlurXterminator was absolutely critical for this processing, and as far as I know, there are no free alternatives. There are a few decent free alternatives to noiseXterminator (SCUnet is very good), and StarNet is as good as, if not better, than starXterminator (but slower). There is a free 30 day trial for the RC-Astro plugins.

unless your delivering an image to a paying customer, you never have to be "done". Signal-to-noise Ratio increases to the square root of integration time; so, to make your SNR 2x cleaner, you need 4x as much data. to get 3x cleaner, you need 9x as much data... etc. so... do you have to go all the way to 16x duration to see any improvement after 9x? no, of course not- not only does the additional data continue to improve your SNR, but more data also lets you be more selective in which subs you include (automatically, using rejection stacking). so, now you can either process 10h of data to get slightly better than 3x improvement, or you can intentionally choose the best 9h worth of data from your 10h pool and see other qualitative benefits beyond the SNR improvement. so, in short, there is no perfect amount of time; more is always better :D also, to address another item from your post: yes, in general, doing a mix of exposure times can help with subjects like Orion, that can be easily blown out- however, there isn't a *tremendous* difference between 5, 20, and 30/60 second subs, in terms of dynamic range. I think that advice is more attuned to folks who are doing like, 10 minute, 5 minute, <1 minute HDR on subjects like M42.

[person] sounds like you have the makings of a really interesting workflow. I would consider setting up a shell script that automatically rsyncs the FITs on your Seestar directly to the VPS whenever you connect it- you could maybe add in some light folder structures or tagging as well. Where is the VPS hosted? Is disk space expensive? You could even work out a hot/cold storage model, where your most recent data is on the faster storage, and older data migrates to slower cheaper storage over time.

First, congrats on getting a s30 pro! Welcome to the club :) that m31/Andromeda image is actually pretty good for 5/10 minutes! Many of the images you see here, and in other groups, are the result of *many hours* of work. The Seestar can automatically capture sub-frames (subs), each 5-60 seconds long. The telescope can “live-stack” those into a single image; the total combined length of all the subs is the “integration” time. You can capture subs for the same image ver multiple nights, and then “stack” all of those “subs” in the post-processing section of the Seestar app, or you can copy them to your computer and use software like Siril and PixInsight to stack and process there. My best Andromeda image is just over 9 hours of data, combining subs from the two different filters in the Seestar S30 Pro using Siril. https://portfolio.astroguide.space/regions/andromeda-frame/#m31-m32-m110-andromeda-galaxy-4h-rgb-5h-ha-cool-2519652c19

Though it’s twice the price, I much prefer this EQ adapter; the fine controls are much more predictable. I normally run the s50 on this and the s30 Pro on the skywatcher wedge, and this polar aligns much, much faster. 2-3 small adjustments and it’s done. I’ve tried swapping the Seestars, and this head consistently aligns faster. https://amzn.to/4wCztei

First off, I this looks like really good data that your Seestar has captured. though there's some jitter/jumping, that can be remedied with software- like you've said, the hardware did its job- the good news is, you can absolutely bring other software tools to help mitigate the anomalies in the data. At a minimum, you could bring this video in to Siril to either re-align or remove the jumping frames, which is awesome. Of course, we all want hardware and software to work perfectly, but thats rarely the case- so I would rather have solid, reliable hardware and an open software ecosystem than the alternative. as others have mentioned... the value of the Seestar packages (and all smart telescopes, honestly) is hard to beat; I'm been spending months trying to build and operate traditional astrophotography gear, and the cost and learning curves are both insane compared to the ~$1k cost and literal 15 minute setup of smart telescopes. I have absolutely nothing to do with ZWO, but I am actually very interested in understanding the feature requests you've mentioned: - fast EQ/Alt-AZ switching: to switch between these mount modes, you *must* manually move the telescope, and carefully position it; I don't think of this as something you can/should be able to do "fast", like switching between the main and wide camera, or turning the LP filter on and off. Also, the seestars have at least 2 prominent indicators: the light on the device changes color based on mode, and the telescope icon in the app changes. what use cases do you have where your frequently switching between modes? - Proper Mosaic Planning - the built in mosaic mode completely handles planning, sequencing, and stacking 'panels' for mosaics. It doesn't use a traditional WxH panel layout, because that can produce uneven results and seam artifacts since conditions change throughout the night: if the sky brightness is very different for panel 1 vs panel 3, thats going to cause obvious seams; by spreading the panels continuously, this type of mosaic prevents that. Now, personally, I'm not a fan of Mosaics at all... but I have had pretty good results with manually plotting panels, capturing over many nights, and then assembling mosaics in Siril. is that the kind of workflow you're looking for? - the app currently supports Lunar/Solar video stacking, but you have to choose RAW first... is this the functionality you're looking for? or are there other lunar/solar video stacking modes that I'm not aware of? - Proper lunar/solar processing: I was under the impressing that "Limb Enhancement" (and honestly, limb/flare style imaging) was way behind the capabilities of Seestar, and required HA telescopes/filters; are people actually out here capturing this kind of data with smart telescopes?

SNR (signal to noise ratio) improves with the square root of integration time; so, a 4 hour capture will have 2x better SNR than a 1 hour capture. To reach 3x improvement, you need 9 hours. 4x improvement, 16 hours. Because it’s a sub linear relationship, there is absolutely diminishing returns- 25 hours of integration isn’t 25x better than one hour; it’s only 5x better…. Each additional hour increases SNR less. adding more time is almost always advantageous, but each additional hour adds less improvement that the one that came before it. I have about 25 hours of data for Eagle nebula (split between HA and SII filters), and I’m still collecting more. Even if you reach a point where additional hours aren’t adding value, you can get *better* subs, under clearer conditions, and then use rejection stacking to choose the best from a larger pool of data. https://portfolio.astroguide.space/regions/sagittarius-serpens-border/#m16-eagle-nebula-13h-ha-12h-sii-cd19d6c677

https://portfolio.astroguide.space/research/custom-rig-fov-survey/ I’ve put together a website showcasing the difference in the FOV between the s50 and the s30 pro; it’s pretty significant… but it’s not the only difference that matters in night to night use. The s30 pro has much more forgiving tracking; if properly aligned and stabilized, both can deliver consistent frames with low rejection, but the s30 pro is more forgiving of less precisely alignment and can recover better from minor disturbances. The s50 has much finer pixel resolution (2.43 vs 3.74 arcsec/px), resulting in noticeably finer detail.

Honestly, this is a great capture- and owl nebula isn’t much more impressive than this with a s50. The s30 pro and s50 are complementary instruments, not competitive. The s50 doesn’t do well with wide field subjects like North America Nebula, California Nebula, Andromeda Galaxy, Elephant Trunk, Sagittarius region, Veil, etc. the S30/S30 Pro don’t do well with smaller subjects, like most galaxies, planetary nebula, and more compact nebula like Tulip and Pacman. Neither of them are any good with planets. The challenge is figuring out what the best subjects are for the equipment you have, the location your in, and the conditions available on any given night- and if the opportunities don’t match up with your imaging goals, then figuring out what gear does. Attaching my M97, from s50, for comparison.

The S50 and S30 Pro are complementary instruments, with very little overlap. If you get an S30 Pro, it will open up a whole new roster of subjects that you can’t really capture with the s50, along with Milky Way mode. When the S50 Pro comes out, it’s unlikely to overlap with either of these telescopes… depending on which sensor they chose, it will either offer even tighter fields of view, enabling higher resolution for smaller targets, or a larger field of view (somewhere between the s50 and the standard s30) with finer resolution.

I have the innorel fluid head, the skywatcher wedge, and the K&F version of this mount, and the K&F is my favorite by far. You can make the most precise adjustments, and it holds its position reliably night after night. I use this one with my Seestar s50- I take it off every morning and put it back on every night, and it’s reliably within .2 polar alignment without any fine tuning… and I can get to 0/0 very quickly. Strong recommend.

its ironic that you just posted this, because I've just started organizing my notes to write up my process for this 😃 this isn't the exhaustive write up (I'll probably post that on my site in a week or so), but here's the cliff notes version of my process: - AstroArchive: As soon as I plug in either of my Seestar telescopes or the USB-thumbdrive I use with my ASIAir, my iMac runs a script that rysnc's all the FITs from those devices to a 5TB external drive. essentially mirroring the folder structure. - AstroActive: when I choose a project to start working on, I run a script from a terminal (e.g., "Library_builder NGC_1499") that copies the files from AstroArchive to AstroActive (a 1TB external SSD). when it copies it, it only copies the FITs, and it automatically files them into a folder structure: {subject}/{source-filter}/{date}/{lights|flats|darks|bias}. - AstroScratch: when it's time to actually do work on the files, I have a 500gb quota'd volume on the internal drive on my iMac called "AstroScratch"; the internal drive is significantly faster than either of the external drives, so when its time to actually work on a project, I do that from here. in Siril, I create a new home folder for the project, and then I'll stack from the library folder on AstroActive *into* the home folder on on scratch; so, the initial read of each file is somewhat slower, but it immediately writes the calibrated copy here, and then uses that for the rest of the process, so I only do the "slower" read once, and then I operate from that point on on my fastest drive. - When I'm done with a project, or if I want to put it on the shelf for a few days and take it out of AstroScratch, I move the working files to a "Project Workshop" folder on AstroActive. - I also have a "Final Results" folder, that holds finished FITs and PNGs of every project, and drives the https://portfolio.astroguide.space website (every project, good bad and ugly, ends up on that site). this is a pretty standard "cold, warm, hot" setup; the cold storage is on the biggest, slowest drive, and the hot storage is for the most recently used data, on the fastest, smallest volume. the AstroArchive is essentially immutable history, and each layer above is increasingly transient, and can be deleted as needed. I also use a tagging strategy in the file system; subjects are tagged down in the archives, so I can say "library_builder --tag Cygnus", and it will surface all the individual subjects with that tag, and build out the session folders for every session, for every date, all the way back in the archive.

Where are you shooting from? For your first EQ mode target, be sure to choose something that will spend most of its time between 50 and 60 degrees latitude- lower than that can cause tracking performance issues, and higher might accentuate imbalances in your rig, depending on how extreme your latitude is. Also: budget at least 30 mins after sundown to get polar alignment right. Watch YouTube videos ahead of time, and aim for at least .2/.2 accuracy if. It better. It makes a huge difference. There are lots of great videos- I think Space Koala has a great PA tutorial for Seestar.

Another note: at first glance, I thought you were using the Seestar s50 mount. The mount you’re using looks decent, but I would suggest extending the legs, not the central height extender, and maybe *not* extending the very last extension- the thinner the legs get, the less stable they are, and the more they’ll transmit vibration. You’re absolutely going to want to weigh this down, either just with ankle weights or with a ballast hammock.

As everyone else is saying, the 3pt leveler isn’t required for EQ mode; in EQ mode, your mount is aligned to the earths axis, not your horizon. In alt-AZ mode, you have to make sure the mount isn’t “tilted” in the forward/back/left/right sense that we’re accustomed to, and that you see with the 2 bubbles in the level calibration procedure. Throw all that out the window in EQ mode- instead, your concerned with pointing at true north (left/right rotation instead of tilt), and converging on the earths axis of rotation (up/down tilt, based on your latitude). If you have that right, you’re good to go. Now, that’s not to say that the 3PL is completely useless- it gives you a few inches of height, which could help make alignment easier mechanically, and it gives you some additional clearance to make sure the arm of your floating head doesn’t collide with the tripod legs. It can also give you finer adjustments (if you line it up properly) to tilt the latitude axis in smaller, controlled increments, compared to the manual lever/locking mechanism of that head. Finally, it absolutely introduces a flex point, and introduces additional variables that could cause things to go wrong… but imo, given the max 60 second (most likely 30 second) exposures that the s30 pro supports, flex is unlikely to be your gating factor- wind, vibrations, and other stability issues are much more of a concern, (again, as already mentioned) some ankle weights will help- I would also add vibration pads. I started with exactly this setup, and still use most of it- I have links to the gear I’ve used at https://portfolio.astroguide.space/gear

How comfortable are you in Siril? If you’re just stacking in the Seestar app, then shorter subs, separate 10 mins runs, and then stacking all together works ok, but might lead to star issues. If you’re willing to do some extra work in Siril, follow Naztronomy’s videos to register/stack the comet separately from the stars to keep the coma from smearing.

hey [group], remember this poll from 2 months ago? I wanted to come check back in on the progress that I've made, and ask for more feedback :) I've tried to make progress on most of these items: - there is a new recommendation engine - Capture Studio 2.0 and Telescope Workshop have been released - the new Solar System Mode introduces a bunch of lunar and solar system planning features - the start of "Adventure Mode" is in place, with the Dark Sky search capabilities and comparisons I still have work to do on all of these, but wanted to get some feedback- how do you think this features are coming? Which areas should I focus on the most? are there any other areas of the existing app that you think need attention, or can you think of any areas that are missing all together?

[person] is this with the Seestar s30 pro? I’ve actually had a somewhat similar problem that was related to plate solving- I’ve actually submitted a patch to the open source project that will hopefully be in the next release. As a workaround… try stacking by night, and then go to the “Individual stacks” folder. Open the stacked result from each night, and make sure they’re all plate solved. If they’re not, then they might not be included in the final stack. If there not plate solved, try installing the the astometry.net solver locally, and selecting that as your solver in Siril. This won’t completely fix the problem, but it might recover large portions of your stacks if that’s what’s happening (the patch I submitted to the repo will actually fix it at the root, and ensure that every individual sub can get plate solved)

First off, congrats on getting 11 nights of data- that’s awesome!! Post processing on your computer, with Siril, can absolutely produce better results, but it’s gonna take a few steps. First off, which scripts in Siril are you using? Siril is capable of a lot of things, including rejection of bad frames, mosaic processing, weighted blending, etc, and that’s just the stacking part…. The “raw” stacked results are just the starting point- there’s lots of additional processing that has to be done (corrections, stacking, grading, etc) in the stacked image. Look for the Naztronomy videos on YouTube to learn more about stacking, and look for “deep space astro” for some beginner videos specifically for broadband subjects- I think his first broadband video is actually on m32 as well.

Seestar will take care of this for you- however it’s framed in the Seestar app, that’s how your image is going to be oriented when it’s complete. One important caveat: though the Seestar offers a rotation option in the app, it doesn’t actually have a camera rotator- it accomplishes the rotation by capturing a mosaic and cropping out your requested frame, so you’ll need much more elapsed time to reach the same integration.

Couple of things: - you can polar align without the filter, and then add it afterwards. - if you had to, you could do auto focus with out the filter, then add it back, and manually tweak the focus. - when your using an external filter, you have to do a new Flat Shoot in sensor settings. Ideally, you would do this *after* polar alignment and focusing, but that can be hard, operationally. - your focus point is generally the same for the entire sky- try to pick the brightest thing you can see (same general altitude is best) and focus on that, then switch to your preferred subject (and make sure autofocus is turned off then). - try shorter subs at first, and make sure all other sources of interference (wind, vibration, etc) are taken care of- the screenshot shows a focus issue, but it also shows significant movement during the exposure Can you link exactly what filters you purchased?

[person] weeeeelllll… under Bortle 1, you might not technically *need* the filters, especially for strong signals like HA/OIII on veil, because your red/blue photoreceptors will pick it up anyway. Remember, filters *only ever* block light, so you’re technically getting less photons with the LP than with no filter. In normal skies, those filtered photons are the ones you don’t want. In theory, at a Bortle 1 site, all the photons coming your way are good. The LP filter, in this case, with veil, will block out some of the broadband light (mostly from stars). If you want a more natural scene, turn off the LP filter, and you’ll still see veil, just with more stars. If, on the other hand, you want a stark, vibrant super nova remnant ona darker stage with fewer stars, keep LP on

Is there a specific reason to choose 20 second subs? When you say “collect meteor frames”, are you intending to only stack the frames that have meteors in them? If you do average stacking, won’t that diminish each individual meteor, because they’re only going to be in a single frame? Would Sirils additive stacking work better, at least for the meteors?

[person] I’ve plugged your original question and my answer (written from memory, so maybe not perfectly mathematically sound) into my astrophotography project in codex and asked it to clarity the math. It agrees, in general, that the main difference is going to be read noise/ less subs=fewer sensor dumps, so if all else is equal and your just dealing with sky noise, less subs is better. Here’s what it produced: The basic stack SNR is approximately: \mathrm{SNR} = \frac{S\,T} {\sqrt{(S+B)T + N R^2}} where S is the target signal rate, B is the background rate, T is total integration, N is the number of subs, and R is read noise per sub. For equal five-hour integrations, the target signal and photon-noise terms are essentially identical. The difference is the read-noise term: * 180-second set: 100R^2 * 300-second set: 60R^2 So, everything else being equal, the 300-second stack has slightly better mathematical SNR. If both exposure lengths are already sky-noise dominated, however, that difference may be negligible.

It depends on how much your specific imaging context relies on dithering for SNR. Assuming the same dithering frequency (and drizzle settings) between the two sessions, the 3 minute sub session is going to get 66% more dithering than the 5 minute sub session (of your dithering every n frames). If what your imaging is close to the resolving limit of your scope/sky, then more dithering is giving drizzle more variation that it can use to better recreate detail. If the noise in your image comes from your sensor (hot pixels, or other fixed panel noise,etc) then more dithering will lead to cleaner images. this all hinges on the source of noise in your data- if it’s systematic to your rig, then more subs (and more dithering) is a tool to improve it. If you’ve already eliminated all the systematic noise from your rig and are now dealing with actual sky noise, then less subs incur less read noise, and that will produce a cleaner result.

[person] (signal to noise ratio) improves with the square root of integration time; so, a 4 hour capture will have 2x better SNR than a 1 hour capture. To reach 3x improvement, you need 9 hours. 4x improvement, 16 hours. Because it’s a sub linear relationship, there is absolutely diminishing returns- 25 hours of integration isn’t 25x better than one hour; it’s only 5x better…. Each additional hour increases SNR less.

[person] Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Sulfur are some of the most abundant elements in the universe, and form the backbone of most of the color you’ve ever seen in astrophotography photos. An HA/OIII filter (like the LP filter built into most smart telescopes) isolates the light that comes from Hydrogen-Alpha and Oxygen-III, while a SII/OIII filter isolates light from Sulfur-II and OIII. I’ve used those filters to capture 13 hours of HA and 12 hours of SII data, then separated that data into channels with Siril, and recombined them into the image here. “LP” stands for light pollution; Seestar brands itsHA/OIII filter as LP, because isolating those emissions is a good strategy for avoiding light pollution. L-Quad is yet another filter, that isolates 4 different wavelengths: Hydrogen alpha and beta, OIII, and SII.

In Astrophotography more time is always better. Most projects require many hours of data. So, settings wise, you’re generally trying to do what you can to maximize exposure time. You want each frame (sub exposure) to be as long as your gear can handle, and then you want to stack as many subs as possible (integration time). Lots of things can interrupt this, though. An EQ mount is a big help, because it simplifies how your mount has to move to track your subject, and less movement means less opportunity for tracking errors. Wind and vibration can interrupt your subs and lead to dropped frames, so a sturdy mount helps too. The longer your sub (let’s say 60 seconds), the more likely something will interrupt it- so you generally start with shorter subs and worn your way up as you stabilize your rig.

what kind of experience do you want to have your son to have? these are considered "visual" telescopes; meaning, the primary way your meant to use them is by manually pointing them at subjects and looking through the view finder. this is great for a really visceral, direct connection to the night sky, but they can be frustrating to use- finding subjects, focusing, and actually observing require patience and coordination, and the payoff might not be amazing. you're not going to see anything sharp or colorful. the Tabletop Dobs that people are recommending are much, much less frustrating than the traditional tripod/tubes that you've posted, and the results will be better, but still not jaw dropping. on the other hand, if your budget allows for a smart telescope (there are models from Seestar and dwarflabs for <$500), you'll get a very different experience: essentially instant, awe-inspiring results, practically zero setup- but the results are on your phone/tablet, and some would argue thats a less engaging experience. I've attached a collage that has the very first 2 images I ever captured with my Seestar, and 2 of the more recent ones, all essentially "straight off the telescope" , no external processing. its literally impossible to get results like this from a purely visual experience, but if your trying to reduce screen time, its a tricky balance.

see if you can get a tripod/adapter situation for your iPhone. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9QGQNYH?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_dt_b_fed_asin_title_6&th=1 I've used this mount for a bunch of things... any iPhone from the past 3-4 years will probably do a decent job; again, I'm not sure exactly what the best approach is (interested in hearing what you planned for the full rigs!), but you could either do a reasonable timelapse video with the iPhone, or, when mounted on a tripod, night mode allows for 30 second long exposures, that are surprisingly decent. I think you can capture raw mode as well for long exposures (I'll verify tonight). there are even apps that are essentially intervalometers, that will let you capture entire sequences, but you'll have to stack separately.

Both are “accurate”. They are different scientific interpretations. Depending on how you stacked in Siril, it likely did a background extraction, in which the processing algorithm attempts to remove “background” light from the image that is more likely to be from local sources (streetlights, etc) than astronomic signal. There are not many “processing mistakes” you can make in the Seestar app; you don’t have many choices. In Siril, you stacked the subs into an image- that’s a great start. The script you chose made lots of decisions- none of them seem like the were wrong.

There are pros and cons to processing on a computer vs on device; the pros of doing it on device, as you’ve seen (and shown), are ease and speed. The disadvantages are that your choices are limited to what the software enables. The advantages of using dedicated software is you have kind more control over every step of the process- how multiple images are “stacked” to create a single image with better signal-to-noise, how gradients and other artifacts are repaired, how the (essentially black) raw image is “stretched” to draw out color and contrast, how colors are balanced and graded, etc. the disadvantage is that it’s significantly more complex. Photoshop, at least in my experience, is a tool for cosmetic/aesthetic manipulation of images. Astrophotography software packages are scientifically grounded tools designed to treat images as data (at least the good ones are, like Siril and pixinsight). I’m going to reply to each of your images with examples that I’ve collected over the last 6 months; you can browse my entire portfolio (good, bad, and ugly 😆) at https://portfolio.AstroGuide.space

Whenever you see colorful images like this, you are most likely seeing what’s know as the Hubble Palette, which is a specific variant of what’s called a false color palette (SHO is the most popular, but there are others). In these palettes, the wavelengths of light that correspond to specific elements (Sulfur, Hydrogen, Oxygen) are captured using filters and then mapped to the Red, Blue, and Green channels of an image. You can capture and extract these wavelengths using filters; the Seestar telescopes come with an LP filter that isolates HA and OIII into the red and blue+green channels. You would need another 3rd party external filter to isolate SII, then you could run channel extraction form the captures to get isolated channels, then recombine them as SHO. If that feels like too much trouble (which it honestly is), then you can simulate SHO with a a number of scripts/plugins.

whenever you do anything to change the "visual train" (e.g., add filters, add/remove dew shields, etc), you should capture new flats. whenever you see new hot pixels, you should run hot pixel correction. these are both part of the calibration process that is applied to every sub you capture. Flats help remove dust and vignetting from your images. Hot Pixel Correction creates new "Bias" frames, which help identify and eliminate sensor noise. these don't just arbitrarily remove pixels every run, they only mask out pixels that report readouts that are significantly out of bounds. the image enhancement that the telescope performs is akin to capturing "Dark" calibration frames. it doesn't have to do this by altitude, it has to do it for different sub lengths and sensor temperatures. If you change sub length, or if sensor temperature changes significantly, the system will decide to capture new Darks. you can just let it manage that itself. between Darks, Biases, and Flats, the only thing you really have to concern yourself with is Flats, and thats only when you add/remove components from your setup.

I use a wide variety of 2” filters. You can get 1.25 and 2” filter adapters on high point scientific, Etsy, eBay, etc. For very strong filters (especially my svbony sv220 SII/oiii filter), it can have trouble with polar alignment. Plate solving often works, autofocus can be challenging. In an ideal configuration, you would be able to polar align, frame your subject, and autofocus, then after that install the filter and (importantly) reshoot flats before starting your capture. I don’t have a great routine for capturing flats in the field, so instead I install the filter with a magnetic adapter, shoot flats, the. Remove the filter and do PA/AF. Then I reapply the filter (since it’s magnetic, it can be properly aligned again) and execute my plan. I routinely get 30 and 60 second subs. No issues with dew. I have some more setup details and a gallery of results available here: https://portfolio.astroguide.space/gear/

I think its important that folks understand something- the Naz scripts, as incredible as they are (I use them almost exclusively), are really just a UI on top of all of the functionality provided by Siril. they don't literally stack any different than what you could do completely manually with no script at all. So, in my experience, it absolutely looks better, because it makes things easier that would take me hours to figure out and setup on my own. Specifically multi-session session management, registration, rejection stacking, and "stacking stacks".

I don’t think it’s technically accurate to say the s30pro tracks better- I think that because of Tue larger field of view and lower pixel density, it’s more tolerant of drift and can maybe keep more frames that would have been rejected at the higher pixel density of the s50. I have both: yes, s50 drops more frames, but the frames it keeps at more detailed, even though the s30 pro is higher native resolution. The best answer, as everyone says, is both 😀

[person] all of my research suggests that reflection targets really want *no filter*, and tons of integration time. The only really substantial reflection project I’ve done was Rho Ophiuchi, and I wasn’t incredibly impressed with my results- I just don’t think it was ever high enough in the sky for me. As such, I tend to save reflection (Iris, for example) for my clearest, look free nights, so I can go no filter on them. I would guess that l-pro does better than quad, because most reflection subjects (excluding Trifid, Orion, etc) don’t really have emissions features, so you wouldn’t get the benefit of quad. Full moon is coming- I might put quad on for a night and see how it does as a torture test :)

[person] that’s good! Try not to think of it as fixed, though- Bortle 9 is often considered as SQM below 18.0, but in reality, different parts of your sky will have different SQM all the time. I’ve attached the light dome map for my regular observation site- you can see that SQM is much higher to my east (NYC is like 60 miles away), and that matches what I see in the night sky.

I use external filters all the time. They work great, and unlock a lot of potential from the Seestars. Ironically, though, remember that filters work by *blocking* light. With a strong narrowband filter, you will get better contrast on nebula, but your stars will be softer, and polar alignment/plate solving will be harder. You might want to also consider a filter like the Optolong L-Quad Enhance, which is similar to the built in LP filter in the Seestars, but is less harsh on star light.

Next: Bortle is very coarse grained: sky brightness isn’t best represented by a single number. There are a number of factors (baseline sky brightness, altitude, directional light domes, the moon, humidity, subject brightness, filters, etc) that will all factor in to how much integration time you need. I’ve built an Integration Advisor into capture studio, a pro planning feature in AstroGuide https://astroguide.space/guides/capture-studio/#integration-advisor

is your goal to just make pretty, colorful pictures? have a blast with photoshop. it has all the tools in the world to recolor things to your hearts content. if you want to adjust the colors in your captures to reveal scientifically accurate details, you're going to need a scientifically accurate program to process your data to reveal details. in most of the colorful images your seeing, the colors represent the chemical structures present in the data; red often corresponds to sulfur, green to Hydrogen-alpha, and blue to Oxygen. This is known as the SHO palette, popularized by images from the Hubble telescope. At a bare minimum, the built in LP filter separates HA into the red channel and Oxygen into blue and green. You either need a different filter to capture Sulfur, or software can often infer sulfur statically from the other channels (less accurate, but still sound). Once isolated, you can recombine those channels to create a standard RGB image. This is what software like Siril is capable of. in SHO images, yellow isn't yellow, it's a region of space rich in both sulfur and hydrogen. teal is hydrogen and oxygen. purple is sulfur and oxygen.

when you say it "just does not want to capture", do you mean that its rejecting frames? or it literally won't let you start capturing? or something else? I've used L-Pro plenty of times with s50 and s30Pro with no issues. which filter holder are you using? have you re-shot flats? it could be an issue with plate solving or focusing- I've had that issue with strong filters, but never with L-pro. you should always be capturing new flats whenever you do anything that changes the visual train, especially adding filters.

here's a brief rundown of the filters I've used: - Astronomia UHC: very minor upgrade; I actually used to use it along with the LP filter. - Optolong L-Pro: nice "broadband" filter. increases contrast overall (darks are darker), and stars seem sharper. - Optolong L-Quad: a good mix of broadband/narrowband. you get bright stars, as well as good color from HA/OIII channels. the HA/OIII isolation is closer to the built in LP filter than it is to L-eXtreme. - Optolong L-eXtreme: super strong filter; HA shines bright and clean, stars are considerably dimmer. - SVBONY SV220 SII 7mm filter: this is the game changer, imo. its incredibly slow (as in, takes much more time to capture comparable signal), but having the SII separated "unlocks" the HA from your other sessions, letting you move it into green, and really take advantage of SHO. I have a write up of how I applied the SHO process to my Pacman nebula data, that includes a side by side comparison tool that lets you look at unprocessed L-eXtreme and SV220, as well as HOO and SHO variants. https://portfolio.astroguide.space/stories/pacman-nebula-hoo-sho/

Yes, I’ve tried, and no, it doesn’t work :/ combining HA/OIII and SII/OIII isn’t just a matter of stacking them together. You have to stack them separately, then separate all the channels, then (very roughly) combine all the OIII, move it to blue, and move the HA to green, and then normalize everything. It’s a few steps beyond what the Seestar app can do now.

[person] this isn't really a Seestar specific problem, its a challenge with mosaics in general: when your stitching together different images, taken at different times under slightly different conditions, its inevitable that the background is going to be different from image to image. Stacking, by nature, can handle this relatively well when there is even overlap (like when dithering, and images are only off by a few degrees/pixels), but when you have large areas that only partially overlap, there *is* going to be visual artifacts. Naztronomy's scripts do a better job of normalizing the background before stacking, so it's less apparent. Seestar intentionally does a wandering/snake style pattern when creating the mosaic, to try to minimize the effects as well. The ability to do Mosaics in Seestar is a crutch; when you want more FOV, then you have that option- but it absolutely comes at a cost. my math might be slightly off on this, but it will take at least 4x longer to reach the same level of quality doing a 2x mosaic. its a tough trade off- if you really want wider FOV, then I strongly suggest the s30 pro (instead of the s30 or s50). If you really wanted to do smaller subjects, though, like the majority of galaxies, then the better optics and higher FOV of the s50 are a better choice.

Welcome to the club!! A big part of getting good results is choosing the right subjects for your equipment. the S30 has a great field of view, right in between the S50 and the S30 pro- you want to try to find subjects that are big enough to fill a good portion of the FOV, but not so large as to require mosaics (which are good, but can take a lot more time). If you like galaxies, your choices are somewhat limited; Andromeda and Triangulum are the only individual galaxies (in the northern hemisphere) that will really fill your frame well; you can also capture M81/M82 (Bode's and Cigar) galaxies, or other groupings like Leos Triplet and the Markarian Chain. As for Nebula, some great choices are Lions Nebula and Wizard Nebula; there's Also Elephant Trunk, Heart, Soul, North America, and California, but those might be a bit large. The "Best" subjects really vary based on time of year, time of month, your observing conditions, how much time you have, and what gear you have. I've build a free iOS app (http://astroguide.space) that is designed to help new astrophotographers learn about the night sky, their equipment, and the conditions that lead to great images. Have fun!!

First, welcome to the club :) the first few months can be challenging- glad you stuck through. Plans are absolutely essential, especially if you have a good battery, or a stable power source. There are lots of things that can cause dropped frames- wind, vibration, polar alignment issues, and subject altitude. The duration of the session, though, absolutely shouldn’t cause dropped frames- But session duration is likely correlated with other things, like altitude or meridian flip (the telescope may have to do some acrobatics when your target crosses the meridian). Can you share an example of a plan where you saw frame rejection increase later in the plan?

There are going to be a few more layers to this cake :) first, yes, there are 2 folders, one with subs, the other with stacked images. If you capture the same subject again, you’ll get more subs and a new stacked final image. If you run deep sky stack, it will read from the subs and place the result in the stacked folder. If you go into the new AI editor, that’s a different storage area, and images in your phone are a different set as well.

[person] answer is LP, but actually, you kinda have the question backwards. Instead of asking, “I want to shoot M8 and M20, Bortle 6, which filter should I use?”, you could approach this as “I’m Bortle 6, so I want to use the LP filter as much as possible because broadband targets are going to be challenging, will M8 and M20 respond well to the dual narrowband LP filter?” And the answer is yes :)

short version, yes, this is bad, especially if it happens frequently, because the 'gears' are very sensitive. happening once isn't the end of the world. its happened to me a few times, but hasn't resulted in any significant performance problems. The issue this is most likely to cause is increased declination drift; luckily, in EQ mode, the declination gear is used less, but you still wouldn't want to damage it. as others have said, turning off the "close arm on completion" is the first line of defense, and getting a hinged dew shield seems like a good idea; I have one that is also a filter holder, but I'm actually not super confident in using it as a filter holder because I'm concerned it won't hold the filer steadily enough. For me, I'm less concerned about the literal dew shield (as stated, the SQM improvement is significant, and imo worth the diffraction) and more concerned with filter holders. I've built "sunscreen warning" into https://astroguide.space specifically for this issue :) sunscreen warning looks at the last subject in your schedule, and calculates the angular separation between the subject and the sun throughout the day; it always suggests covering your optics, but if the angular separation gets too close, it warns of serious sun damage.

first off, this is a super fun journey you're starting 🙂 I've been playing with these techniques for a few months, and I've gotten to a pretty decent spot with it. there are a couple of gotchas... I'll try to be brief. 1.) you're gonna need to capture way more SII than HA data. SII is super faint for most targets. I would budget 2x the time for the SII data. 2.) once you have your HA+OIII and SII+OIII data, stack and do basic cleanup on them separately; bg removal, SPCC, crop away noisy edges, etc. 3.) I then take the 2 panels (HA and SII), register them together in a sequence, do a series of sequence operations on them. Crop, Star removal, and basic denoising (I like SCUNet at this stage). it's important that the 2 images are exactly the same size/registeration before star removal, because you're going to be mixing and matching the channels from them. 4.) ok: now extract the RGB channels from both images; you'll have 6 individual channel FITs (HA_R, HA_G, HA_B, SII_R, SII_G, SII_B). 5.) your gonna use pixel math to blend those together. oxygen is relatively easy; you can do something like (HA_G+HA_B+SII_G+SII_B)/4, and just save that as OIII.FIT. if you have awesome data, then you can just save HA_R as HA, and SII_R as SII. If your data is less than awesome (🙋🏻‍♂️), you're going to have to do pixel math shenanigans to mix a bit of your HA_R into your SII_R, for example. (e.g., SII_R*.8+HA_R*.2). 6.) Now, you have 3 choices: you can just use pixel math to calculate all 3 channels at once, and produce a single image. or, you can use single expression mode to create 3 separate channels and then use RGB recombination to combine them. Or, finally, you can take your separate channels and bring them to the Narrowband Palette Picker plugin, which will help normalize the channels and give you a huge menu of potential combinations beyond simple SHO. 7.) after all that, your gonna look at your image and hate it 😀 data rarely looks great straight out of pixel math/recombination; I normally go straight into Statistical Stretch, unlinked, normalized, no black clipping, and can usually get decent results from that. You can see some of my best (and worst) SHO results here: https://portfolio.astroguide.space/tags/SHO/

thanks for this additional feedback- these are great ideas, and amazing tools, and I appreciate the details about adjusting the stride. you're completely right; capture time is more valuable than processing time, and its generally completely worth it to spend the time in post. Since this was my absolute first real DSLR capture, though, I'm looking forward to trying more things at capture time; for example, I'm working on getting a proper guiding setup so that I can properly dither during capture, which is what will ultimately help the most. even if I could eliminate the walking noise from this data, this data is just the first few hours of many, many, many hours that I ultimately plan to capture, so I want to focus on getting the capture right in the first place :) That being said, I was able to apply the Seti Astro suite well enough to get the image to a place that I was comfortable using it as an example on the website for my app! thanks again for the pointers, Clear Skies! https://astroguide.space/guides/capture-studio/

First off, I have quasi-good news? The app already works on Macs. You can just install the iOS version on your Mac and use it. This will absolutely work on the lowest cost Mac (the new Mabook Neo starts at $699). Second, if you want to keep an extensive library on your device, you can- I would recommend saving the live stacks, or -restacking to your liking, then deleting the subs- you should be able to keep a pretty respectable library of “active” shots on your Seestar. If you really want to keep all the subs… or if you have so many images across time that you want to keep… or if (as you described) you have images from multiple cameras- then instead of thinking about running Seestar on a PC, might I suggest that you’ve reached a point where Siril, or other laptop-based editing tools, might be more appropriate?

not exactly sarcasm, but to be honest, I should have been more direct. I've spent tons of time working with data from M81/Bodes galaxy; there are plenty more experienced than me, but I pretty comfortable with what bodes galaxy looks like, how its shaped, how its dust lanes are laid out, etc- and though its clear that this started with data from bodes galaxy, the AI has turned it into something different. Yes, the 'stars' are still in the same place, so plate solving will still identify the pattern as the region that bodes galaxy resides in; and honestly, I wouldn't even say that I dislike this image- but it feels like its at least one step away from scientifically accurate post processing.

a couple of things.... first, 0.2/0.2 is good.... but you know whats better? 0.0/0.0 :D it absolutely can make a difference. 60 second subs is pushing is on seestar, regardless of how well polar aligned you are. when. you ask about field rotation- are you referring to the noise running along the left side of your frame? thats not exactly field rotation, but I think its similar; field rotation comes from (afaik) the fact that, in alt/az, because of how the subject is 'rotating' as it moves across the sky, the center of your image gets more overlap than the edges; so, if you do 60 1 minute subs in alt AZ, the center of the image actually gets data from all 60 subs, but as you get closer to the corners/edges, some areas of the image might have much fewer subs contributing to them. Similarly, with dithering, the subs that you take intentionally don't line up perfectly; the seestar intentionally moves the center of the image every few frames. this accomplishes a few things- it provides good data for drizzling later on (to increase resolution), and it eliminates walking noise by making sure the same part of the sensor doesn't always image the same part of the sky. a side effect, though, is that the edges of your image don't all have the contribution of every frame. Seestar crops this away; but when you're stacking in siril, you can see those jagged edges. The good news is.... elongated stars are super easy to deal with these days :) the Aberration remover script is free, lightweight, and works really well- [person] parallax does well (even the free version), and cosmic clarity:sharpen does great too.

I have an s30 pro and an s50; I've used a friends dwarf at a star party. the Seestar telescopes have better optics, a more vibrant accessory ecosystem, and a very active, helpful community. The Dwarf products are smaller and more portable, and the Stellar Studio tools are way better than anything offered on the Seestar itself. if you want an all-in-one package, the Dwarf might be the better choice. Both of them absolutely hit a ceiling in terms of what you can do on device/in-app; if you want "a significant amount of manual control", the place where you exercise that most is post processing, so ultimately, the app advantages of Dwarflab become less relevant, and the sensor/optics advantages of the Seestars become more important. I think its also worth noting that the Seestars are made by ZWO, which is a major player in the larger astrophotography industry; the Seestar is really a stepping stone to the whole range of ASI cameras, the ASIAIR astronomy computer platform, and all of their other astronomy products (Mounts, Focusers, guide scopes/cams, etc). Basically, if you see the in-app functionality and editing capabilities as your end game, then dwarflabs wins. If you see the telescope as the starting point, and really plan to focus your attention on post-processing using Siril or PixInsight on your PC, then I would go with Seestar.

I'm about 6 months into astrophotography; started with an S50, added a S30 pro after a few months, and recently started doing traditional (Telescope, DSLR, etc) imaging. the S30 Pro is incredibly competent. you will get surprisingly good results on your first clear night. Yes, there's room for improvement, yes there are some slightly rough edges, yes software updates can be unpredictable- but overall, ZWO has managed to cram over 6 components (an Alt/AZ goto mount that can switch to EQ, a Scope, a Camera, a Computer, wifi access, auto focus, a filter wheel, and basic editing ) into a package with a price tag that is in the ballpark of each of those components on their own. There isn't a better value out there. That being said, though, the S30 pro is the *start* of your work. to get amazing results, your going to have to spend lots of time (and possibly money) on post processing- there's no way around that reality.

This data has amazing potential :) the banding is likely coming from the moon, but more subtly, it’s possibly showing up because of different gradients on the underlying subs. When you stack your data using the naztronomy script, there’s an option to do bg removal; that tries to remove gradients before stacking. Naztronomy also has options for drizzle- drizzle is a technique to increase the resolution of your image by averaging/combining nearby pixels and extrapolating detail. It can also help with some kinds of noise- it might help here. Also, Naztronomy offers weighted stacking- you can weight by noise, star count, or FWHM. I experiment with all 3, different options work best with different data. Finally… you can always just stack more data :) on more clear nights, complete the same (or similar) mosaics- don’t stress linking it up exactly, the plate solving/registration will take care of that. The gradients that your seeing aren’t of equal strength on every single sub, but the Nebula itself is- so when you stack more data, the nebula will be stronger and the gradients weaker. That’s the magic of stacking!!

First of all, great looking data, and good work getting started in Siril. The learning curve isn’t too bad, and there’s lots of great resources out there. Now, as for your question… I need to start by saying something super obvious: nebula are more colorful than galaxies :) they always generally will be- if your aiming for something that remains scientifically grounded, your galaxies, generally, are going to be more muted. Color is astrophotography (generally) comes from either emissions or dust/reflection. Light from galaxies is essentially just lots of starlight, which is “broadband”- your getting the full RGBIV+ spectrum, lands on your sensor as white light. Some galaxies have active, large Hydrogen-Alpha regions- if so, that *could* be reddish. Some are undergoing active star formation, which triggers more blue reflection light… but those are often going to be flooded by the basic white broadband glow. You could capture the HA regions using filters (either HA specific filters, or dual narrowband filters) and then integrate that HA dare into your red channel. I’ve also found that using human-weighted luminance while stretching can bring out more natural color. You could also just go completely overboard with Veralux and give up on scientific accuracy.. it’s all up to you 🫠

depending on the subject, you can get some decent "straight outta seestar" images; theres actually a Facebook group named exactly that, if you want to see some examples... but practically everything you've ever seen posted has some level of post processing- there's not a telescope out there, smart or not, that creates *amazing* images without significant post processing. You do not have to shoot dark/bias frames- the scope handles that for you as needed. You can shoot new flat frames, to accommodate any changes you make to the visual train (adding filters, dew shields, etc). ZWO recently added an option to reject planes/satellites during live stacking. reception has been mixed- some folks say it can be a little overzealous. I *think* if you re-stack, in the app, it removes them, just via the standard stacking process; if not, its not terribly hard to scroll through and manually delete the subs that have trails. do you have experience with traditional astrophotography? what are you hoping to accomplish with an s30 Pro?

at one day of experience, you're fine, you don't need an EQ mount just yet :) if you reach the point where you are regular doing long sessions (more than an hour), an EQ mount will eliminate a very specific kind of noise that your images are going to start accumulating in their corners (field rotation), and there aren't many good ways of eliminating it other than switching to an EQ mount and avoiding it all together. When you get to the point where you want to reliably combine sessions from multiple nights, you're going to want them all captured in EQ mode to make the alighment/registration in Siril more consistent (and again, to eliminate field rotation/stacking artifacts). Tripods and EQ wedges are very good 'investments', because you can use them with just about every future telescope you might end up getting. Personally, for your first purchases, I would spend more on the EQ mount than the tripod; I would recommend a basic SkyWatcher tripod, and the K&F Concept 3-way tripod head. The K&F is very, very stable, and you can easily make the small adjustments needed to get perfect polar alignment in EQ mode. I have a page outlining all the gear I use/recommend, take a look and feel free to ask any questions. https://portfolio.astroguide.space/gear/

First off, congrats on your first plan the results should be in “my album” section of the Seestar app, you’ll need to be connected to the telescope to see them. Under “Seestar”, you should see stargazing albums for each subject in your plan. There will be a regular album and a “sub” album, if your enabled the option to save all subframes. Second, in terms of target selection- M13 and M81 are great targets! You’ll want to try to find a time where M81 is higher in your sky, though- below 20 degrees altitude can be challenging. Also, it looks like you’ve turned the LP filter on; that filter really works best with nebula, and other emissions based subjects- clusters and galaxies do best with no filter.

[person] an important thing to note is that your 3 goals are actually wildly different, from an astrophotography perspective. - Saturns rings really wants long focal length (1500 minimum), and is best served by whats known as "lucky imaging"; basically, you take thousands of very short frames (often accomplished by shooting video), then use specialized software to stack those frames, picking out the 'luckiest' frames, in terms of minimized atmospheric effects. - Milky Way wants literally the opposite; much shorter focal length, very long exposures, equatorial mount. - Galaxies and DSOs could want a wide range of optics- Large Nebula need a larger FOV than small galaxies. what they share in common is you want longer sub length exposures, and many, many hours of integration, all stacked together. As others have mentioned, Smart Telescopes can get you 2/3 of the way there, for literally a fraction of what you would spend on dedicated gear. the Seestar s30 Pro does a good job with Milky Way, most Nebulae, and the largest galaxies (Andromeda and Triangulum are great, Whirlpool, Pinwheel, and Bodes/Cigar are ok, the rest are sub optimal). Seestar s50 (currently discontinued, but available second hand and new version is coming) bridges the gap to smaller galaxies and nebulae. There is (AFAIK) no smart telescope on the market that handles planets well. The physics just isn't in their favor- you need a larger aperture, and that doesn't work with the closable, portable form factor that every manufacturer is going for. Smart telescopes combine Mount, Optics, Imaging, Focuser, computer, dew mitigation, stacking, and basic editing into a single package with no worries about wiring, setup, or calibration; your biggest sacrifice is precision guiding. You can barely buy a single component of a custom rig for the price of these end-to-end systems.

If your using EQ mode, yes, every time you move *the tripod or the wedge*, you should repeat polar alignment. Your not aligning the scope, your aligning the mount. If you have a way to remove the scope and replace it in the exactly same spot on the mount, then the scope will essentially stay polar aligned. I have my tripods semi-permanently installed in my yard, and just have to put the scopes on them- I still run through polar alignment, but it goes much faster- I’m usually only off by .02 or so when I start.

some updates: - Heard back from Seestar Support. They're going to try to just replace the port, and not the entire motherboard- that will be a huge savings, if they can do that. - this damage is considered user error, and is not covered under warranty. - this *should* have been easy to avoid; I have 10' USB-C cables semi-permanently rigged. I normally give them enough slack. not sure what went wrong last night. - Reached out to 3 different iPhone repair shops- they don't want to touch this thing with a 10' pole. I get the feeling that the shops out near me are just used to working with their pre-existing tools and kits for phones, and don't actually have the chops to diagnose/fix hardware they're not familiar with. - I've seriously considered cracking it open and fixing it myself, but then I know that every time something is a tiny bit off, I'm going to blame my shoddy workmanship; so I'm going to send it in. -went out and searched a bit more, with a magnet- no luck. its not literally a needle in a literal haystack, but its a very small metal thing in a bunch of grass. Also: it's not still connected to the USB cable. I think the most likely answer is that its still inside the scope, but I don't hear it when I shake it a bit. -In what might be a lucky coincidence, ZWO USA headquarters is apparently 20 minutes from my job :O I reached out to support to see if I could drop if off myself, and save the time and expense of shipping it via UPS. haven't heard back yet. -I've ordered a couple of different magnetic USB-C options to try out. Am I right in assuming that they will only support charging, and that I wouldn't be able to use a similar cable inside for data transfer? thanks for all the (mostly helpful) support :D I'll let ya'll know how it lands

[person] current price of smart telescopes (Dwarf and Seestar specifically) kinda puts them in a different league. you get a complete astrophotography package that can image a huge catalog of amazing deep space objects (galaxies, nebula, etc) with practically zero setup for under $1k, once you take some accessories into account. traditional telescopes can't really touch that- you're going to pay much more, you're going to need to do a lot more setup work, and its going to be much less portable. the biggest drawback is that you can't really image planets with current generation smart scopes. I recently got a 5SE; the learning curve is *huge* compared to smart telescopes. after a few nights, I'm almost at the point where I can effectively find a subject and get my camera focused. meanwhile, during that same time, my 2 Seestars have taken 30 hours worth of exposures. If you want to put your eye to an eyepiece and see amazing things, you need a traditional scope. if you want to capture incredible images on your first clear night, get a smart scope.

hey folks :) I'm resurrecting this old thread (that I'm very happy I bookmarked) because I have a 3D printing ask, and I'm hoping one of ya'll can point me in the right direction. I've recently picked up a second hand CelestronNexStar 5SE; the general opinion is that the OTA is good, the tripod is OK, but the single arm mount is not suitable for longer exposures. I'm looking for a 3D printed mod that I can use to adapt the 3-point Celestron tripod to use a standard 3/4" mounting screw. has anyone come across a plate like that? seems like it would be a relatively simple design- would be happy to collab to make one, if anyone is interested. thanks in advance!

first off, it looks like you've got some pretty good data here! I think it can be recovered, but it's pointing to 2 or 3 important things to take into account. First off, your main enemy here is Alt/AZ mode. you're doing very long sessions with alt-az, and there's going to be diminishing returns from doing that, no matter what. see that spiral "Fan out" pattern? thats caused by the mount having to track the subject in both axises as it moves through the sky; if you get an EQ wedge, then the Y/altitude/declination axis is fixed, and the camera only has move along the x/azimuth/Right-Ascension axis, and each subframe isn't rotated to a different degree then. just that one change will dramatically improve your long exposures and mosaics. now, second- every frame you have looks like it has a uniform light vignette around the edges. you might be able to fix this by taking new flats, and then images you take from that point on might have less vignetting. you might also need a dew shield, or something else to block stray light- not sure how dark your skies are, or if there's local light pollution. third: it should be possible to recover the data you have. what you would want to do is eliminate the vignette/gradients from *each individual sub*. that sounds crazy, but don't worry- the naztronomy script for siril has an option to do this automatically. if the gradients are uniform enough, then the script should be able to help. if that doesn't work, try stacking each "panel" (sure looks like you did east and west panels) separately, then remove gradients/crop those individual panels, then stack the 2 panels together.

If your goal was driving engagement, then I’m sure the competition was a success- if your goal was to give astrophotographers exposure, or to actually identify the “best” images, then a single massive poll is a poor choice. The primacy effect (early/late times in the list will get more voters) or other purely social influences (popularity) are going to take over. If you have more than… even 10 or so choices, you need to create a bracket, or some other tiered system. Take 50 competitors and break them into 8 individual polls with 5-10 intentionally grouped images. Run those for 3 days, then take the 8 winners and do 2 polls, 4 images each. Then either reward the 3 highest votes across both, or take the top 4 and do one final vote. This would honestly achieve both goals- it would drive much more engagement to your community, And it would also give competitors much more exposure while minimizing social influences.

There are, however, some filters that take a slightly different approach-instead of trying to block everything except for the specific targeted narrow bands desired for nebula, they (basically) try to allow everything, and then only block specific known light pollution wavelengths. These would technically be ok for galaxies, but no-filter is often still better, unless you have very bad Light pollution that is precisely countered by the filter

HA/OIII are the most common, but not the only kind. SII/OIII is available as well, and there are also Tri/quad band that allow multiple elements to pass into the RGB channels. Stars emit light across the entire visible spectrum: that’s called “Broadband” light. The light from galaxies comes from stars, so galaxies (and clusters) are “broadband” targets. Remember, every filter works by blocking light- so, almost be definition, filters will block galaxy light. The better the filter is for nebula, meaning the more it narrows down to only the spectrum desired, the worse it is for galaxies, because it’s blocking all that broadband light.

After market filters are literally sunglasses for your telescope. They work by suppressing certain wavelengths of light, and allowing other wavelengths to “pass”. The result is less interference from light pollution, and improved contrast for the light that’s allowed to pass. Wavelengths of light are associated with specific elements- The most common filters are designed to pass the wavelengths associated with Hydrogen Alpha and oxygen, which are hallmarks of practically every nebula; HA is mapped to red, and OIII is mapped to blue/green. An important clarification is that these filters don’t “enhance red”; what they do is detect hydrogen and oxygen, which shows up in the red and blue/green channels. When you see red, you’re seeing hydrogen; yellow is both HA and OIII; blue is pure OIII, etc.

[person] built in LP filter (like any narrowbsmd filter) doesn’t explicitly block color, it inhibits certain wavelengths of light, and isolates others. The filter in Seestars is an HA/OIII filter, which means it is designed to accentuate light that comes from hydrogen-alpha and oxygen, which are abundant in most nebula. Ha and alpha emissions bands are close to the red and blue regions of the visible light spectrums; most filters funnel OIII into both blue and channels to improve data collection with camera sensors. Filters do this so that other types of light pollution, like street lights, car lights, etc, don’t leak into your astronomy images. It’s literally like putting special sunglasses on your telescope. blue Horsehead is a reflection nebula- it’s blue color doesn’t come from OIII emissions, it comes from dust reflection. The LP filter is aggressively suppressing everything that isn’t HA or OII, which explains why the dust reflection doesn’t show in that image.

[person] images that your seeing are likely using what’s called the SHO palette, made popular by the Hubble telescope. It involves mapping emissions light from Sulfur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen to the RGB channels. You get that light using filters; the Seestar LP filter gives you Hydrogen (red) and oxygen (blue and green); you need an external filter to capture sulfur, then you can do channel extraction, pixel math, and recombination to construct SHO. If that seems like too much trouble (which it probably is), there are scripts that can create faux sulfur from your LP data and give you synthetic SHO. The attached pic is like a dozen or so hours with both types of filters, combined in Siril to create SHO.

[person] this is great, subtle advice. there's alot of guidance thats based on individual objects, when in reality you have to take the entire frame into account when choosing things like filters, sub length, etc. To expand on this slightly: I think it's best to think of things like this from a "filter first" perspective. what does the LP filter do? well, its a dual narrowband filter that primarily 'passes' HA and OIII emissions, and does its best to suppress everything that *isnt* HA or OIII. so, then you have to ask, does the image that I'm trying to capture have those emissions bands? only use the filter if the answer to that is yes. I've build a "framing advisor" into https://astroguide.space to provide the info to answer questions like these; you can download the app on the iOS App Store :)

Seestar PM hi! I hadn't realized that the annotations could be saved- thats great! I was thinking more of an ability to turn them on after the fact. for a super specific example, I recently wanted to go back and look at data I captured for Trifid Nebula a few weeks ago, and see if M21 was also in frame. it would have been great to be able to pull it up in the seestar app, go to that image, and click "show annotations" in the edit experience. regarding the multi-seestar-network mode: 🤯 CANT WAIT TO SEE IT! awesome :) I am really impressed by all of the official ZWO involvement in these forums; its really showing the community much the company values the voice of the customer. Thank you!

Welcome to the hobby :) Calibration is a process for improving the images you capture by compensating for aspects of your imaging train. Flats compensate for your optics, and darks and biases compensate for your sensor. The darks, flats, and biases are combined with the “Lights” frames that you capture during imaging. Seestar completely calibrates images for you, 100%. The only part you play is by shooting flats in the advanced>calibration>flat shoot. You only have to do it if you add external filters. Stacking takes individual frames (calibrated or not) and combines them into a single image. Seestar does this live while you capture, and you can also manually do it through deep sky stacking. You would do it manually if you wanted to include more or fewer frames in the stack- those are your only options. You can copy the subs off your telescope via USB, and then stack on your computer. Siril (free) and pixinsight (not free) are the most common options- They give much, much more control over stacking, and also have extensive post processing capabilities.

Great question, and I think I agree with a common theme coming up in the answers. With visual, there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes from tracking down and finding a subject- that completely makes sense. With astrophotography, specifically with smart telescopes, the “tracking down and finding” is a complete non issue- the accomplishment, at least for me, comes from planning and executing a multi-night plan to create amazing images. I got my Seestar in December, and by the time I knew what I was doing, Andromeda was basically out of the sky. I spent weeks learning about the celestial coordinate system, understanding the night sky, learning about equipment, filters, stacking, post processing, etc- now that andromeda is back in the sky, I was able to capture the data and process it the way I had planned. It’s a different kind of accomplishment.

Short version: in astrophotography, longer exposures are almost* always better. With specialized Astro-rigs, lots of folks target 3, 5, even 15 minute exposures- but that requires absolutely perfect conditions and equipment. the telescope can “track” your subject through the sky, enabling those long exposures. With alt/az (default for Seestars), you can do max 30 seconds. With EQ mode, that goes up to 60. To do higher than that, the telescope needs to make constant micro corrections, based on input from a guide scope- that’s not possible with Seestars. If the telescope detects star trails during the capture, it will discard the frame. The longer the exposure, the more likely that is to happen due to a variety of causes: wind, vibration, or poor alignment/leveling- so, though it’s possible to do longer exposures, shorter exposures are safer. The guidance is: use the longest exposures that your gear/setup can handle, without dropping too many frames.

yes but, as far as I know, those .fits already have the flats/darks/biases "baked in". so, lets just say I forgot to re-take flats before attaching my SVBONY SV220 SII filter (purely hypothetically 🙃), and that filter has a very different profile than the flats that are in place for the IRCUT filter... theres no way I can "recover" those FITs :/ I would love to be able to re-take flats manually and recalibrate in Siril, but thats not possible now because the Fits that I've downloaded are already calibrated.

First off: your sensor is *probably* safe. of course I can't be 100% are, but in general, its completely safe to operate your seestar during the day, in daylight- you just have to be sure you don't image directly into the sun without a solar filter in place. if your Seestar was tracking the position of M17, even if it wasn't actually successfully capturing, it shouldn't have experienced direct, unprotected sunlight. Second: AstroGuide has a feature called "sunscreen protection 🕶️" that checks the last subject in your schedule and evaluates how close the sun will get to it's position if you decide to not close the arm, and will give you a serious sounding warning if your going to be in danger :)

During those 3 hours and 45 minutes, the lighting conditions changed. Your Seestar tracked m 101 a dot moved across the sky taking frames, and “collecting” the different conditions- each shows up as a different rectangle frame in your final capture.because your using alt/az, the telescope has to move its rectangle shaped camera up and to the right (basically) for each frame- that causes each frame to be slightly mid aligned, which the Seestar has to correct for ehen it stacks, producing the field rotation your seeing. With an EQ mount, the scope just points up/down to the subjects declination, and then rotates on the RA/azimuth axis to counterpart the rotation of the earth. Every stack lines up consistently, and there’s no field rotation.

[person] short answer is… there is no short answer 🙂 sub length depends on a dozen different factors- the sky brightness at your exact location, the relative sky brightness of the objects location in the sky, altitude, filters, etc. then there are practical concerns: yes, 60 seconds might be better from a signal to noise ratio perspective, but not if half of your frames get rejected due to wind or vibration. In short, it’s generally unambiguously true that longer subs will get you better signal to noise ratio, unless you’re dealing with an exceptionally bright subject, in which case you might consider shorter subs to avoid “blowing out” the brightest spots of the image. M57 doesn’t qualify for that. With m57, you want maximum integration at whichever sub length is going to give you the least dropped frames (20-30, most likely). I’ve attached one of my better m57 shots, a bot over processed to show the central star, which is 15.7-15.8 magnitude (pretty dim) EDIT: central star is basically demolished by Facebook compression 😭😭)

Thanks for taking the time to explore the app; I know there's a lot to explore! one of the guiding principles of AstroGuide is to never be "just a big list of targets", because that was one of the things that I found frustrating about other apps. So, when you tap an hour on the forecast, or an observation window, you can get a list of recommended subjects that will be visible during that hour, based on the overall conditions, including the obstructions that you have configured for your site. If you want to further limit that to a specific narrow window of visibility, you can tap the filter button (three horizontal lines in the top right of most list views), and then narrow that list down to a very specific range.

once you stack, you *could* save the FIT file, but stacking doesn't (by design) maintain every single bit of data from the image; it averages the data across frames, and depending on how your stacking, there are absolutely knobs and dials you can turn to change the results of the stack, so there's benefit to saving the individual subs. I have a tiered system: as soon as I bring my seestars in each morning, I plug them into my laptop; a script recognizes the drive and rsync's everything to an "AstroArchive" volume, into folders separated by year/quarter. Then, I have another script that I run that pulls subs data for specific subjects onto "AstroActive"; this is a smaller, faster external hard drive. when it copies the data here, its only FITs for the subs, and it filters them into folders per session: {subject}/{filter}/{date}/{sublength}/Lights. Then, I have a "Projects" folder that goes on the fastest drive that can hold it (laptop internal drive is best). When I do stacking in Siril, I stack from AstroActive directly to the projects folder, and do the actual post processing work on the stacked FITs. when I'm done with a project, the final image gets copied/cataloged to a "Results" folder, and the project gets archived to a "Finished Projects" folder on AstroArchive.

[person] think of declination as where the object actually is, using galactic/celestial coordinates. Altitude is where is appears to be over your horizon. Remember, the objects aren’t moving, *we* are 🙃 so if you take an objects declination and your latitude, you can determine its maximum altitude. The actual curved path that it appears to follow will culminate at that maximum altitude.

Honestly, this is great for a months worth of experience. You’ve completed an entire workflow: subject selection, EQ setup, data capture, transfer, stacking, processing, finishing. Lots of folks barely make it past step 2. The first advice I would give is target selection- as you can see, andromeda gives you plenty to worth with, pinwheel much less so. lol for other large targets that take advantage of the FOV you have: North America, veil, elephant trunk, jellyfish, etc. next- can you tell us a bit about your post processing workflow? Are you separating stars from background yet, and processing them independently? What’s your approach to color correction? Which tools are you using for background removal, denoising, sharpening, and color grading?

[person] I find it best to do “tower” stacking- instead of everything in one big stack, stack each individual session, then combine by optic train (filter/scope/camera) and sub length, then HDR combine the sub lengths within each optic train, then combine those into a final composite, doing basic cleaning and weighted stacking each step of the way. This gives a straightforward way to handle important differences in conditions between nights ,incrementally add new data, and not let bad sessions *poison* good data.

[person] just a word of caution, from someone who has ran into this wall many times: there are only 2 actual solutions* to noise: more integration time and darker skies. Noise reduction software helps, but it can only go so far before your post processing the noise reduction algorithm instead of the photons you captured. (Asterisks because if you’re using traditional telescopes, then obviously calibration is a huge part of noise management, but with Seestars, we have very little influence in that part of the workflow)

When you “rotate the frame” on a Seestar, it doesn’t actually rotate anything, it causes the telescope to take a mosaic, where it stitched together multiple overlapping images. If the conditions change during the process, though, you might see the effects of the changing conditions as artifacts in the mosaic. If one panel of the image was taken closer to sunrise, for example, it could be brighter, and you would see that- same with cloud cover, or streetlights going off, etc.

can you describe the process you're using now, in a bit more detail? at a high level, my process is: High level post processing approach Step 0: file sanitation: Get the stacked image to a clean starting point. Crop, Plate Solve, background removal, aberration removal, spectroscopic color correction. This is basically just auto-pilot with every stacked file; after this, the stacked file gets a “_clean” tag. Level 1: Noise suppression: If needed, run pre-stretch removal. Step 0 was about just getting the file to its bare usable state; this step is about repairing deficiencies in the capture. This is where I might use SCUNet or Prism to get rid of noise as close to the source as possible. These tools specifically recommend use before stretching. FORK: this is where we split the image into starless and star mask. The next few steps are just for the starless image. Level 2: Stretching: Whether you’re doing ‘manual’ stretching with GHST, or using something like Statistical Stretch or VeraLux, this is when stretching starts, and where aesthetics start coming into play. I’ve learned to stretch primarily for structure and contrast, not color. This is about pulling the shape out of the linear image. Level 3: color grading: This is where I get lost in VeraLux curves, Vectra, HDR, and alternating steps of denoising and sharpening. If I’m going to go too far, this is where that’s going to happen. MERGE: ok- once color grading gets to a stable place, it’s time to get the stars back into the mix. Level 4: Star tweaking: Stars will often get some special treatment before merging back in, in the form of additional denoising, sharpening, etc. Level 5: recombination: Actually recombine starless and stars. Stretch the stars, then potentially rebalance the starless in response to the stars before squashing them into a single file. Level 6: finalize color grading Level 7: pass out of exhaustion and wonder how you spent 5 hours wrestling with photons that began their existence back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Depends on what you want to capture? The s50, if you can get it, is great for smaller subjects, which ends up including most galaxies and all planetary nebula. The s30pro is great for medium to large emissions nebula like North America Nebula, Veil, Heart + Soul, etc. I can think of 2 northern hemisphere galaxies (Andromeda, Triangulum) that work very well with s30- for practically every other galaxy, s50 is better. Neither is good for really small stuff- which is why I’m hoping for a S70… but the rumors are more in line with an s50 pro that uses the same 585 sensor that the s30 pro uses, which would double the current s50 FOV at about the same pixel density.

first off, good experimental instinct; the notion of continuously refocusing seems sound, but that would only help if the conditions that were leading to needing to refocus were changing that rapidly throughout the night. You should generally only have to refocus if there is an extreme change in temperature, and thats unlikely to happen every 30 minutes. there is definitely a focus problem, but I'm not sure if thats the *only* problem; your star shapes seem off as well, and that could be a host of things, like alignment/level/vibration/wind/etc. can you give us a bit more context of your observation setup? where are you generally located? how was the weather? how stable is the ground under the tripod? was this EQ or Alt/AZ? how's the local light pollution? all of that factors in to how well the seestar can keep (and maintain) pinpoint focus.

great capture! the texture/contrast in the "wings" region looks really nice, and the stars have good shape. can you tell us a bit about how you processed in Siril? the famous blue/gold/transparent look is called the "Hubble Palette", which is an example of a palette remapping known as SHO, in which different emissions bands are mapped to the red/green/blue channels in the image; specifically, Sulfur to red, Hydrogen-alpha to Green, and Oxygen to Blue. to accurately recreate this, you would need to capture the channels separately using filters, and then recombine them. thats technically possible with smart telescopes like Dwarf/Seestar, using dual narrowband filters. This palette swapping is done because naturally, Ha and SII are very close to each other on the spectrum, and naturally land in the red channel- so in your image, everything thats red is a combination of HA and SII... and its kinda impossible to actually separate them, though there are scripts that will try to approximate the SII channel. the "core" of your image is white because theres a ton of R, B, and G there all at the same time. theres not much you can do, without filters, to tease the original colors back out.

really, really great work!! I really like the post processing style you've adopted; dark backgrounds, rich colors, dramatic contrast- really looks great. As for Mosaics.... I keep on falling in and out of love with them. the physics are just not on their side: if you spend 4 hours doing integration on a single target, then every photoreceptor gets the same exposure to the same area of the sky for every frame (roughly), so you actually get 4 hours worth of integration. If you spend 4 hours on a 2x2 mosaic, your spreading those photoreceptors across a wider region of the target, so most of them are only going to get a fraction of what they would have gotten... so your 4 hours of integration nets something closer to an hour of actual "depth".... and thats not even the worst of it. if conditions change from when you started the mosaic to when you finished, you're going to see the seams of the different panels, because they're going to have different gradients. when stacking a single subject, those differences from beginning to end of session are better averaged out by stacking. when I want to capture an area larger than my telescopes FOV, I do manual overlapping panels, and I try to do them under as similar conditions as possible, then stack/stitch them using the latest Naztronomy script.... and I've been going absolutely overboard with it. I'm working on a mega mosaic right now, from Nest Nebula all the way down to Lagoon.

As others have said, the less expensive smart telescopes (Seestar/dwarf) are just as easy to use (if not easier), and produce equal (or better!) images. They are grab-and-go, point-and-shoot easy, with the ability to add additional accessories (better tripods, mounts, filters, etc) if you want, and (most importantly) the ability to pull data to your computer for more advanced post processing. The DwarfLabs products probably have the best on-device/cloud processing capabilities, while the Seestar products benefit (imo) from being part of the larger ZWO ecosystem, which is a big player in the overall astrophotography industry. Including a recent shot of the Lagoon and Trifid nebulas, captured with Seestars s50 and s30pro using EQ mount and astro filters, and heavily processed in Siril.

[person] more I learn, the more nuanced I think it is- the way I think of it is essentially, all filters are subtractive. No filters actually add anything- the LP filter doesn’t *add* h-alpha and oiii, it just blocks some of the light that competes with it when it’s time to fill the little photon wells in our camera sensors. So, in an ideal world, under pristine Bortle 1 skies, maybe no filter is always best- but with the realities of light pollution, air mass, lunar influence, and sensor limitations, filters let us make creative choices about what data we choose to collect.

Trifid is an awesome subject because it basically has everything- it’s like a smaller, more compact version of Orion Nebula :) while the nebula itself has both prominent HA (red) and reflection (blue) components, it’s also worth remembering that Trifid is almost always in frame with other DSOs, like Lagoon or the M21 cluster; sometimes they might influence your choices as well. For example, I’m assembling the data to do M8 using SHO with RGB continuum data, so my filter choice is “all of the above” at this point 😂

M8, M20 & M21, New Jersey, USA The Lagoon Nebula, Trifid Nebula, and open cluster M21 captured from my Bortle-5 backyard in New Jersey using Seestar smart-scope gear and filters. Since starting astrophotography in January of this year, this is one of my favorite images- I love the texture and depth in Lagoon, and the whispy dust features in Trifid.

Birds of a Feather — Eagle & Swan Nebulas, New Jersey, USA A sweeping wide-field view of the Eagle and Swan Nebulae, M16 and M17, nestled in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. Alongside these two iconic star-forming regions are the Nest, NGC 6604, NGC 6605, and IC 4701, surrounded by rich Milky Way star fields and glowing hydrogen clouds. This image combines over 20 hours of narrowband data captured from my Bortle-5 backyard in New Jersey using Seestar S50 and S30 Pro smart telescopes with Optolong L-eXtreme and SVBONY Duo Band SII + OIII 7nm Filter filters. Processed in Siril as an SHO-style composite inspired by the Hubble palette, but maintaining a darker deep sky tone.

[person] I think of it like this: one of the biggest advantages of the s50 is that it can resolve finer detail on smaller (apparent) sized objects because of its focal length and superstore size. When you do a mosaic, you’re only simulating a larger FOV by taking overlapping exposures- so a 2x mosaic is probably close to 4x less efficient. In other words, to get comparable quality, you might need to integrate 4x as long, and since you have high sky brightness, you were already starting at a deficit. If you want to see the most benefit from 4+ hour exposures, I would recommend bright, emission targets coupled with the Seestar built in LP filter- some good options right now are Lagoon (M8), Eagle (M16), Swan(M18), portions of North America/Pelican (NGC 7000/IC5067), Tulip (SH2-101), Crescent (NGC 6888). Trifid (M20) is great too, and can work either with or without the LP filter. If you really want Galaxies, stick to M81/M51/M101- they’re all great for s50.

[person] ah ok, yeah- Naztronomy’s script is great. You should only need to drizzle the subs straight off the camera- once you’ve done that level of stacking, you can stop drizzling (essentially as you get ‘higher up the tower’). Drizzling takes advantage of the dithering that the telescope does during capture- once you’ve done that, there won’t be enough systematic drift between ‘frames’ to take advantage of- it works great when your stacking dozens/hundreds of frames from your camera- it’s less effective when your stacking a handful of stacks

I'm working on a set of panoramas as well, and I'm absolutely still a newbie :) the way I'm doing it is 1.) taking slightly overlapping frames over multiple nights, 2.) stacking each night individually, then 'stitching' the stacked images in Siril using the Naztronomy script, 3.) post processing the entire 'strip' as one large image. it gets slightly more complicated because for some of the mosaics I'm doing, I'm also doing the Hubble palette, so that means I have to do two separate strips (HA/OIII and SII/OIII), and then register them together, crop them, and recombine the layers before doing post work. I'm slowly realizing how much torture I'm putting myself through doing a project like this with Seestar telescopes... I could be getting the data I need in a fraction of the time if I could only afford better equipment

Calibration (using additional exposures like flats and darks to improve lights) is super important in astrophotography- the Seestar telescopes basically do it for you, completely. With traditional gear, when you are actually capturing data, each sub exposure is a “light”. You have to separately take Flats, which are essentially images of your capture train, and Darks, which are kinda images of your sensor (I’m oversimplifying). You need different flats for anything that changes your capture train, like filters or dew shields. You need darks for different capture conditions, based on exposure time and temperature. Flats and darks can absolutely be reused for different targets, different nights, etc, as long as the conditions (imaging train, exposure time, temp, etc) are the same. Seestar literally does all of this for you (except for one part). It automatically takes darks when it needs to, and applies them. It has a mechanism to let you shoot flats, and you only have to do that when you change the imaging train (like by adding external filters). At capture time, it applies both flats and darks, and the lights it produces are already calibrated. This is great, but it means you cannot recalibrate- you can’t take flats/darks after the fact and readjust. You must capture the flats before your session, and you shouldn’t change anything between when you took the flats and you start your imaging session.

when you stack alt/AZ subs, you'll see a pattern like this; see how all of those rectangles are at different angles, but with the same center? because of plate solving, the stacking software can perfectly align your images, and the center region is going to have lots of overlap from every single sub- but the closer you get to the edges, the less overlap you have from each sub, and the more noise you get.

I would tell my beginner (lol, I'm still a beginner...) self: capture more data!!! I spent countless hours killing myself trying to get good images from an hour or two of halfway decent subs. once you get to 10+ hours of data to start with for a given target, a good rejection stacking process can really weed out less optimal subs, and give you a much better starting point. I've arrived at a workable file management system to capture data on clear nights, sync it all over to my laptop into organized folders, and just let the data accumulate. When I get data for a brand new target that I've never processed before, I'll bring it into Siril and poke around a bit, but I won't stress myself out too much- its really just to evaluate potential.. then I spend significant time on projects that I know I have enough data to get good results out of.

[person] Stacking/Editing that Seestar provides is awesome, especially given its price (free!), the fact that it runs completely on the telescope, and the user experience is shockingly simple. You're right, though, that Siril can do so, so, so much more. as others have suggested, your image here would be considered "overcooked".... but at least you're in the kitchen cooking up something interesting!! your colors are very saturated, and your background is on the flat/dark side- but I really like the way you've oriented the two wings of the nebula in the frame. this is great for a first try at Siril. I've been at this for 6 months, and I still have a ton to learn. keep it up! I've attached my best effort with Veil- I guarantee many folks would say it was overcooked too :D

think of it this way- there are absolutely more small targets that are better suited for the s50 than the s30 pro. the vast majority of galaxies are going to be tiny on s30 pro, and reasonable on s50... but, despite being longer than s30 and s30 pro, s50 *still* doesn't have enough focal length for planets, or for galaxies on the smaller side, or for most planetary nebula. the s30 pro is much better suited for many bigger nebula and nebula complexes- Northamerica/Pelican, Heart/Soul, Orion/Bernards, etc; but 1.) those aren't available all year, and 2.) you're probably going to want/need external filters to really make the most of those targets. its a tradeoff, either way... and like others have said, the best bet is both :D Arguably, the s50 can do mosaics to get closer to s30 scale, but mosaics have a ton of compromises attached. and arguably, you can crop your way into similar framing as the s50 from the wider s30 pro view, but you're going to sacrifice resolution when you do that. one other note: the newly released dual mode, that lets you take milky way shots while in stargazing mode... is kinda a game changer... its kinda like getting a 2nd free telescope. you can get twice as many captures in the same amount of time. if the s50 pro comes out and 1.) has longer focal length, enabling planets and smaller DSOs, and 2.) also has a second wide camera for Milky Way mode, then that becomes incredibly compelling if you're only going to buy one rig.

lol, looks good to me!! 😆🫠 your pavers are more aesthetically pleasing 🙃 I’ve learned, btw, that PA every single session might be bad for your mental health. I was pretty maniacal about it, but recently I’ve tried backing down a bit… i leave the mounts exactly aligned, and just bring the telescopes in and out each night. If the first 10-15 mins are showing good focus, no trails, and limited dropped frames, I just leave it be- if there are symptoms, I run PA again. At least with the Seestar scopes I’m using, the PA readout can be all over the place. I’ve gotten 2+ hours with great round stars and 0 dropped frames at .06 error, and I’ve gotten 50% drop rate and trails at 0.0/0.0. 🤦🏻🤷🏻‍♂️

My thought is…. It’s time to graduate to Siril 🙏🏼. With all those subs, you will get dramatically better results in Siril. First off, you can implement a hierarchical tower of stacks- stack each session on its own, then stack sessions by sub length, then stack those (can also do real HDR then). You can also do better rejection stacking, where the algorithm automatically rejects the worst subs statically. It also can do automatical background removal of *each sub*, resulting in less overall noise. And finally, you can use much better denoise algorithms once you have all that assembled.

I’ve been experimenting with this, and can confirm(?) a few things: the subs that come out of Seestar are pre-calibrated with flats (they can be shot in the advanced menu) and darks that are taken often at the start of the session. The system will periodically take new darks (maybe biases as well?), and these are used to pre-process subs before stacking. I’ve intentionally captured bad flats, and then saw the expected (bad) results in the resulting subs. Because of how the frames are calibrated, “re” calibration afterwards, with your own manually captured flats/darks, will result in worst image quality.

In my understanding, rounder stars come primarily from better focus and more accurate tracking. The longer your exposures, the more sensitive sub is to tracking issues. In Alt/Az, tracking issues arise from a combination of how level/stable your mount is, how high your target is, and other conditions like wind, humidity, and moonlight. Finally, the motion of the telescope factors in as well. With alt/az, your telescope moves in both directions ( altitude and azimuth) continuously. When you switch to EQ, your polar alignment accuracy matters much more than how level your scope is, and your scope only has to move in one direction (azimuth) during your session, allowing for longer subs. long answer: EQ mode will often produce overall better results, including rounder stars, and enables longer subs, assuming all the other issues (stable mount, good conditions, accurate alignment, good subject selection) are accounted for.

first, the HA in cigar looks great! really nice detail. I think you could crank up the HA in bodes, actually- let's see those little rubies of star formation. as for the yellowish tint, and SPCC issues; I've seen similar tint when I process this target in Siril. one thing that helped was switching to human human weighted luminance when doing the initial stretches of the starless RGB data- it brought up nicer colors/textures in the galaxies, for me, but it looks like you have much richer data to start with.

Sooo, a few things. First, everything I’ve heard suggests you basically never need to clean your actual lens. If you really, really need to, then cleaning solution with distilled water and high purity isopropyl alcohol, sprayed onto a microfiber cloth. Any kind of fog is the opposite of what you want here. Also- the Seestars use “Flat” frames to calibrate the images. Flat frames are based on the entire imaging pathway- so, anything that changes the pathway, like filters, changes the light, and warrants new flats. That’s the extent of my knowledge- I don’t know enough about electronics, but I know enough to be scared of what you described 😆🫠

as others have said: s30/s30 pro is better for many nebula and the largest galaxies/regions (Andromeda/triangulum/Markarian's Chain), while s50 (currently discontinued) is better* for most other galaxies, smaller nebula, and planetary nebula. I'm adding an asterisks because though its technically better for many small targets, its barely good enough; for small targets like Ring Nebula, Antennae galaxies, Cat's Eye, etc, 50 isn't quite good enough. You'll get Lagoon with the S50. With the S30Pro, you'll get Lagoon *and* triffid in the same frame. Bubble is better with s50. Rosette is better with S30Pro. Orion is great in both; s50 will fit Orion and Running man easily, S30p can fit span all the way from Horsehead to Orion, if you want to do that. Also: loved your work in Winter Soldier.

L-quad enhance is an excellent filter- it's a good utility player. it works well with emission/nebula targets (isolates HA/OIII), and also works well with continuum targets (galaxies, clusters, reflection nebula), while providing some moon protection and good general light pollution protection. think of the built-in LP filter essentially blocks/dampens everything except a range around HA/OIII, so its great for emission nebula, even when the moon is up (because moonlight is reflected sunlight, which is continuum). the L-Quad, on the other hand, is selective about what it blocks- it allows HA/OIII, but also allows HB,SII, and a considerable amount of continuum, while still blocking artificial light (light pollution) and some continuum. the moon filter, on the other hand... in my experience, not terribly useful. its meant to enhance the moon, and it might help a bunch for visual observation with traditional telescopes, but for astrophotography/stacking, I don't think it adds much value- happy to be taught otherwise, tho.

I haven’t had success with HOO on ngc7000, but I’ve done ok with actual SHO (using 2 different dual narrowband filters). The cyan/blue that you’re looking for is in your h-alpha signal, which is driving your red channel instead of green. There is OIII in that region, but the HA just dominates it. If you let HA be green, then it blends nicely with the OII, and you get teal. Right now, your red HA is blending with the pale blue OII and giving you that pinkish/lilac tone. You can absolutely remap and color grade it with veralux, but you didn’t actually capture isolated “red” and “green” data, so it’s harder to get teal/cyan without bringing red along and getting maroon/lilac instead

[person] off all thanks for downloading AstroGuide :) you can use it to research and plan targets for all 3 at the same time- unfortunately, as of now, AstroGuide can’t directly control any of them, but I hope that changes in the future. I don’t have any dwarf telescopes (yet!), but as far as I understand, you should absolutely be able to control your dwarf and SeeStars at the same time, with the same device (phone or iPad). Let me know how it goes!

I’m doing this right now- I’m on a business trip, and I brought my s30 pro. Here’s what you need to do: 1.) when you get to your destination and setup your scope, first connect to it using “local” instead of “remote”. You’ll be promoted to connect to your telescopes WiFi. Once connected, you should see in the top left that the app recognizes your new location. Next, click on the scope, then click on “telescope network”. Click on local device, then you can click on “change remote location”. You can add a new location, and it will use this for when you connect to the scope “remote”. Next, go back out to the telescope settings, and go into “WiFi”, then “Station mode”, and provide the connection info for whatever WiFi network is available at your destination. Once that’s done, you can disconnect from your telescope locally, and use “remote” to connect to your scope via either cellular or some other WiFi network.

In my experience, 60s subs require (at least) 3 things: - perfect conditions (no clouds, no wind, no humidity - perfect mount (compass and level calibrated, 0/0 level, 0.0/0.0 polar alignment) - perfect target ( 40-80 altitude, bright, no meridian crossing). If you can’t guarantee all 3 of those, go for 30. If you can only guarantee 1, 20. If you can’t guarantee any, 10.

Longer subs result in higher quality in fewer files. You can collect 600 10 second subs or 100 60 second subs- both are the exact same amount of total integration, but the 10 second subs result in 6x more files, which is slower to process in post. There’s also per-frame processing overhead, so it will actually take longer to capture the shorter subs.

I’ll try to provide some initial answers to these very common questions: in general, more exposure time (seconds/sub) and more integration time are almost always better. You want the longest exposures your setup can tolerate, stacked for as long as you can- folks have posted images based on hundreds of hours, and they’re amazing. The max duration your setup can tolerate is based on a bunch of factors: sky brightness (Bortle), target altitude, humidity, wind, tripod stability, and mount. Using an EQ mount allows for both longer exposures and longer total integration. Ironically, Orion Nebula, while probably the most popular target for beginners, has some special circumstances. In general, you still want longer exposures and maximum integration, especially at Bortle 6- but Orion also benefits from intentionally blending in shorter sub lengths to prevent the core from getting “blown out”. Of everything is setup properly, 30s subs is pretty sustainable. Each thing that’s sub-optimal (wind, mount issues, humidity, light pollution, etc) will lead to dropped frames, which you compensate for by lowering your sub length. When everything is just right, and you have a faint target, you can push for 60s, but you’re risking more dropped frames.

Some mornings, I bring it in freezing cold. Some mornings, it’s covered in dew. It’s been very lightly rained on at least twice. One additional safety precaution-make sure you don’t leave the scope I’m a position where it can end up with solar damage to the sensor. If your plan ends on a target facing east, you have to make sure you 1.) set the plan to auto close the arm upon completion, or 2.) if you can do that because your using a filter or some other attachment, insert a “safer” target at the very end of your plan so that the sensor stays out of the suns path. I added a feature called “sunscreen” to my app to warn me about this 😎

I leave my s50 in my backyard every chance I get. I have an extension cord running to a waterproof box, so the actual plug isn’t exposed to as much dew. I leave the tripod in place, weighted, with the EQ mount properly positioned, so that all I have to really have to do is put the telescope on the mount, plug it in, and get started. I run plans, monitor through the app, then in the morning I go down and get it, bring it inside, and plug it in to sync the FITs off.

wow, really appreciating all the interest 🙂 just to clarify- this is an iOS app (sorry no android version yet), and though a PC isn't required at this point, there will also be a companion Mac app to analyze results from smart telescopes (currently tested with SeeStar, but should work with anything that produces FITs). I'm planning on releasing a new build tonight, and then I'll share a test flight link with limited slots available. I'm especially interested in southern hemisphere testers, because I've only used the app in NJ :)

Google didn’t help much in this case :( yes, Altinak might be a picture quality issue because it’s almost certainly going to get blown out- but that’s not going to cause dropped frames. In my experience, dropped frames are caused by: 1.) clouds (and haze and humidity) 2.) star trails. Honestly, that’s basically it. Now, you can’t control clouds- but there’s plenty you can do to prevent star trails. First is altitude- when are you observing? Use the app to find the time of night that your target is highest- anything close to 30 degrees is the danger zone. If your using the default alt/az mount, then you want higher than 30, but lower than 70-ish (going higher won’t produce trails, but it will create other problems for you). If you have an EQ mount, then the higher the better. Next, what’s your sub length? The longer your sub length, the more likely something will go wrong, even for a second, and lead to a discard. For example- if you’re doing 30 second subs, and something happens at second 29 that messes up that shot, you lost the full 30 seconds. But if you were doing 5 second subs, then you would have saved 5 perfectly fine 5 second subs and only lost the last one. Next, movement. Anything that moves the telescope- wind, vibration from walking, from nearby trucks- even, actually, the movement of the scope itself while tracking- any of that can cause trails. So, weight down your tripod (to mitigate wind), consider vibration pads or something similar, and stay away from the scope while it’s working. Finally, I’ve had some specific weird problems with horsehead while shooting mosaics. When it gets to the northern tip of the image, I always get spikes of dropped frames- I think it’s because there are fewer stars there, and the tracking gets confused because there are more stars elsewhere in the image, so it thinks it’s a cloudy patch. This stuff is complicated :) keep trying, keep having fun!

[person] I can get pretty reliable 30s subs- normally at most 25% rejection rate, especially with higher targets. If the target is closer to 30, I normally drop down to 20. I think of it as risk/reward- I don’t think an hour of total integration at 60sec is that much better than the same hour at 30sec, but the chances of a rejected frame from a 2 second gust or a plane passing by ruining a whole minute exposure seems pretty high. If I really want to maximize time, I might drop down to 10, especially if it’s a brighter target.

Some additional notes, for those following along from home: first, I think the red spots are bad pixels on my sensor (or something along those lines). I saw them on another target later that night, but only 1- I think the repeating pattern shown here is because the image is a mosaic- I’m basically seeing that same pixel caught in different individual frames. The green thing… probably isn’t a drone. It just looked too identical frame after frame, when I looked at the individual subs. I think it was a piece of debris or something on my filter- I took it off, cleaned it carefully, and went on to do about 7 more hours of captures on additional targets with no further issues. Finally, rejection stacking in Siri’s with Naztronomys plug-in cleared up these artificacts, no problem.

Continuous doesn’t drop frames, and doesn’t stack live- that’s the difference between the two modes. Continuous will shoot exactly N frames, back to back, regardless of the quality of those frames, and will not live stack them. The Deep Sky Stack feature will stack exactly which frames you tell it to- it doesn’t do any frame rejection. You can manually remove frames (either delete them entirely or uncheck them from the stack). If you copy your subs to a PC, you can use rejection stacking in Pixinsight or Siril.