Seestar S50 - Realistically?

Crap

Can't comment on the particular image without seeing it, but with 10 second subs at its fixed gain it's definitely not blowing out the core and you can see the trapezium in a linear, unstretched image:


And this is with one simple GHS stretch - note that this is only 3 minutes of data but it's not hard to see that you can push this a lot further with more exposure
time. The GHS is key to preserving the core:


The build-in duo-narrowband "LP" filter is similar to the ZWO duo band, it's not the best but it definitely does the job of rejecting most unwanted signal, and with a recent low-read noise sensor (IMX462) getting the faint parts is just a matter of piling on the total integration time - which I don't bother with since my Seestar is purely an EAA machine for me, but I do think it's possible.

Getting out both the inner core and the fainter outer parts thus is mostly a matter of processing skill, in itself I don't think the hardware is totally incapable of it.

There's a lot to be said for short subs on a recent CMOS sensor, even if mechanically the SeeStar is mostly you-get-what-you-pay for (but good value IMHO).

Now if the FoV doesn't match (too small) the poster cropped for field rotation, but if the pixel scale is wrong I'd smell a rat.

There is no "rat" in my post.  You have a large, rectangular box that was rotated about 180 degrees to make my picture of Rosetta.  Look at the description of my post and you can clearly see the raw stack from 2427 images, you get roughly a circle.  I discuss this in my writeup.  To this point, ZWO is activly working on a mosaic feature that essentially makes what I did moot but the point is if you take a LOT of rectangular images that are all rotated AND you stack it with APP, it will stack them and NOT crop them.  You get the whole thing as stacked.

While now 20s and 30s exposures are possible with the S50 you will get a lot of trails with these because there is no de-rotation.  The S50 is not great on ALL objects but for some in the right position it does do an acceptable job, especially if you let it run long enough.  The lack of rotation does affect the final image for sure.  Because you can download all of the subs you can do a much better stacking yourself.  The S50, due to how it works, ALWAYS uses the first image as the reference for stacking.  This is not optimal and makes for noisy upper left and bottom right corner images.  If you stack yourself you can pick a sub in the middle of the stack for reference and this cuts down significantly the noise in those two corners.

Benny Colyn:

Phil Hoppes:
There is no "rat" in my post.  You have a large, rectangular box that was rotated about 180 degrees to make my picture of Rosetta.  Look at the description of my post and you can clearly see the raw stack from 2427 images, you get roughly a circle.  I discuss this in my writeup.  To this point, ZWO is activly working on a mosaic feature that essentially makes what I did moot but the point is if you take a LOT of rectangular images that are all rotated AND you stack it with APP, it will stack them and NOT crop them.  You get the whole thing as stacked.

Talking to OP and remarking on the suspect image he saw,  hadn't even read or seen your post Phil

Ah ok.  Thanks for the clarification.

Either you do it right or you don't do it all, this is my view on the matter. And, frankly, I wouldn't spend 6-odd hours shooting and who knows how many more processing 2427 images for a target such as NGC2244. Can it produce images: sure. Are they worth the price/effort: I doubt it.

I have a Seestar S50 and learning to use Siril.

Out of the box with 10, 20 or 30sec i get very good images depending on how high the images are there are not to much rotation.

This is a short 10sec "exposure" for 14min.
https://cdn.astrobin.com/images/254974/2024/0537f4b1-dfa6-4bc1-a613-458c84df867f.jpg

Even if i'm not good (yet) to post prosess the FITS in Siril i get better stacked images than the inbuilt.

And yes it could probably be better with more images or use several nights and stack together when i learn howto.

But this is my second image. My first was the M27.

And we are waiting for a mosaic mode for the app and ZWO is making the app better for each new firmware.

So its not crap i have more success with this scope than my regular with the atx celestron tracker. And i know that i cannot get 8K images etc.

But its a great scope that for someone is good enough and for others it might kickstart the hoppy to get an even better scope.
And for people saying its crap they dont know what they are talking about or they compare apples with oranges..

Phil Hoppes:
There is no "rat" in my post.  You have a large, rectangular box that was rotated about 180 degrees to make my picture of Rosetta.  Look at the description of my post and you can clearly see the raw stack from 2427 images, you get roughly a circle.  I discuss this in my writeup.  To this point, ZWO is activly working on a mosaic feature that essentially makes what I did moot but the point is if you take a LOT of rectangular images that are all rotated AND you stack it with APP, it will stack them and NOT crop them.  You get the whole thing as stacked.

While now 20s and 30s exposures are possible with the S50 you will get a lot of trails with these because there is no de-rotation.  The S50 is not great on ALL objects but for some in the right position it does do an acceptable job, especially if you let it run long enough.  The lack of rotation does affect the final image for sure.  Because you can download all of the subs you can do a much better stacking yourself.  The S50, due to how it works, ALWAYS uses the first image as the reference for stacking.  This is not optimal and makes for noisy upper left and bottom right corner images.  If you stack yourself you can pick a sub in the middle of the stack for reference and this cuts down significantly the noise in those two corners.

   Hilarious, I've been using the seestar the same way. https://www.astrobin.com/full/nd1dxz/0/?real= This is 50 hours but broken up into 9 smaller straight cropped stacks, thus wasting a HUGE amount of data. I'm drizzling 3x 100 hours of integration but struggling with processing the large frames in a meaningful number on pixinsight. What is your upper limitation on frames with APP? Sorry if I'm hijacking this, but this style of astrophotography is not discussed very much. I've got 35,000 10 second exposures on rosette that I'm dying to figure out.

Regulus Remains:
Hilarious, I've been using the seestar the same way. https://www.astrobin.com/full/nd1dxz/0/?real= This is 50 hours but broken up into 9 smaller straight cropped stacks, thus wasting a HUGE amount of data. I'm drizzling 3x 100 hours of integration but struggling with processing the large frames in a meaningful number on pixinsight. What is your upper limitation on frames with APP? Sorry if I'm hijacking this, but this style of astrophotography is not discussed very much. I've got 35,000 10 second exposures on rosette that I'm dying to figure out.

It took me I think about 2 - 3 hours to let APP stack it.  I've not used APP much before but I was aware how well it did especially on stacking rotated images and making mosaic images.  I tried a few things to get the hang of it and then just loaded it all in and let it rip.  At that point it's just wall clock time.  Cleaning up the final image in PI was a snap as it is just a dynamic crop and go with my normal OSC workflow.  I actually had 3 more days of images as with the S50 it doesn't take a lot of time to take 4-6 hours of pictures.  Set it up and go and then go play with my big glass or head to bed.  Anyway I had close to 5000 subs with my other days.  That turned out to be a bit of a bust as I was lazy and didn't want to "blink" 3000 more frames.  I should have as some of the bad ones made for some fuzzy spots.  There is no free lunch you have to do the work and with LOTS of subs it does take more time.  At this point in time I was just throwing stuff in as I had no idea how it would work.  For me it came out much better than I expected so now I've got a bit of incentive to see just how I can tweak it to do better.  Not everyone is going to like it.  Pick a telescope on CN. ANY telescope.  You will have a nice distribution of lovers and haters.  That, IMHO, is a worthless discussion.  Check the positives and check the negatives.  If it doesn't work for you fine.  Get something else.  If it does, fine, chat with other users and see how you can do better.  I don't get the animosity.

APP is a nice but strange app.  There is like, ZERO documentation which is my biggest pet peeve with using it.  On the plus side there is a plethora of YouTube and I was quickly able to be up and running with it viewing these.  Charles Bracken of Astrophotography fame also uses it and has written a nice quick user guide.  This was also very helpful.  Your question on upper limitation I think is just how long do you want your PC tied up stacking.  ;-).  The 5000 sub run took probably 6-8 hours to stack.  I did a couple of things that made it slower than necessary.  I had the subs stored on an external SSD drive.  In 20/20 hind sight it probably would have run faster if ALL the data was on my Mac's internal solid state drive.  There are probably a  few things to tweak with the app to make it faster too but I'd have to search the user forum to probably find it.

The OP didn't request any proof of ownership to comment on these "things". My comment stands.

Hi @Mike H. I have both a Seestar (and a Dwarf II smartscope ), and big expensive rigs including a very high quality 10 inch carbon tube CDK (Corrected Dall Kirkham) on a high precision 10Micron GM1000 HPS mount ( a well over $25,000 rig), and I'm impressed particularly by my Seestar's optics for the incredibly low price. The Seestar mount though is VERY sloppy/backlashy, but with 10 sec exposures it still works well enough even though about half of its exposures don't have round enough stars for me to want to stack. I've been getting some very nice images from my Seestar even with the limitation of all those thrown in the trash-bin exposures, such as this one of NGC 253, the Sculptor or Silver Dollar galaxy, with the Seestar's saved 10 sec FITs individual exposures stacked in Astro Pixel processor and Processed in Pixinsight. This was about 1.25 hours of usable round-star exposures from a 2.5 hour session. It is a bright and large  galaxy which was easygoing on the Seestar's ability but it did give an I think very nice image. https://www.astrobin.com/kewu2e/ I've also resolved a 17.2 mag , faint and red, 12 billion ly distant quasar with it https://www.astrobin.com/httbzh/ ,  and got a somewhat ok image of Uranus and two of its moons with the Seestar  https://www.astrobin.com/3qvxot/ . It's amazing what an optically fairly decent 50/250mm scope can provide, and I think ZWO are to be commended to be doing it at this sort of stunning price level. I think these types of smartscope will be the future of consumer astrophotography. I love using my Seestar, and my Dwarf II, alongside my big expensive rigs.

Mike H - Sky View Observatory:
I wish I could post the image here. I'm guessing copying his image and posting would be a violation of his rights. You have to see it to believe it. I'll look to see if he posted it anywhere that I could put a link up. It's on the ZWO owners page on Facebook which you have to be a member of to view.

Guys, I didn't post this to start an argument. I just wanted some comments from owners to see if this type of image quality was possible because I said no from the time I saw it. So I'm open to being wrong in my opinion of it. It's just $499 is so cheap. Who of us isn't using $15,000 worth of equipment? That's not including my small observatory. 


Mike

Is it this one from Christian Fiore? https://www.facebook.com/share/p/jhwAfHfz2YtNuuBe/?mibextid=WC7FNe

This is a good result but totally credible.

That's not it Nicolas but very impressive.  


Mike