astrophotography - Brian Fontenot, Author

We finally had some clear skies during the new moon over a weekend, and I got the opportunity to take the Seestar S50 and my usual rig to the dark site for some long overdue astrophotography. I’m a little late writing about this, as this trip was in early June. If I had to summarize my experience with the Seestar, whether it’s from my backyard or the dark site, I could do it with one word: convenience.

The little bugger is lightweight. It connects easily to my tablet or phone. It aligns it self. It finds objects. And it starts capturing data. I set it to grab images of Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, which is relatively bright and easy target, and let it run while stacking 20s images. While it was doing that, I wrestled with getting my Celestron 1100 EdgeHD going.

The evening didn’t start great for me. I began setting up my tables and gear and realized I forgot my power supply at home. I needed it to power my mount, so that meant a return trip home and cost about an hour of time. Fortunately, a friend was out there and watched my gear for me so I didn’t have to break it down and repack my vehicle.

Warding off mosquitos (mostly) and trying not to step in ant piles, I got the hefty scope going and powered up with the Hyperstar and my trusty Canon Eos RA attached. The Astrophotography Tool App was spitting out live images onto my new laptop screen. But, I ended up wasting another hour and a half trying to align the scope over the Skyportal app.

I went through the three-star alignment process half a dozen times, even powering the mount down and restarting the app. I swapped from the device I intended to use for the Skyportal app to using my phone. Eventually, I realized I was misunderstanding the language of the alignment process. It starts on star 0, not star 1. So the alignment kept failing because I was basically aligning on my first star, Polaris, twice.

I was seriously aggravated, but I was able to get the big scope and my fancy DSLR snapping 30 second images of Messier 101, The Pinwheel Galaxy. During that ordeal with the setup, I kept checking the cheap Galaxy Tab tablet connected to my Seestar. I let the capture of the Whirlpool Galaxy run for half an hour. It was actually too much data. The picture below was what that looked like. I’m not sure how that satellite streak stayed in there.

Like with all the Seestar images, I was able to touch up the final JPEG on my tablet/phone with the basic photo editing tools (the light balancing slider is awesome). The result is pretty rich with detail.

I navigated to a variety of other targets, seeing what else I could capture. The same friend that watched my gear suggested I try comet, Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). The comet was in the Seestar object library. It found it quickly and I was getting data back after only a few minutes. The image is a little grainy after 6 minutes of imaging, but still pretty good after a little on-device touching up.

Comets aren’t large objects, so I thought to try a planetary nebula next, Messier 97, The Owl Nebula. I could capture it with my big scope with my ZWO planetary camera (assuming the USB cable doesn’t interfere with the Celestron Wi-Fi controller… that’s worth it’s own blog) and process it on my laptop, but that would have meant removing my DSLR, the Hyperstar, the counterweight, and reinstalling the secondary mirror just to capture this one target.

I moved onto some objects recommended to me in the Seestar app. Messier 27, The Dumbbell Nebula, came up and the Seestar started spitting out images. This is only after 3 minutes of 20 second images.

The last object I went after I had never seen or heard of before. It was listed in the Seestar app as being above the horizon, so I gave it a shot. It was so cool looking, I tried point my big scope at it to image it with the DSLR, but the object was not in the Skyportal app library. My astronomer friend suggested that was probably because Celestron wants you to buy the premium SkySafari app, which has a much larger library. I haven’t done so, yet, but I probably will before I go out next time. The Seestar got it, though. Check out NGC 6334, The Cat’s Paw Nebula.

In the time it took my to capture about an hour of data from the Pinwheel Galaxy with my big scope, I managed to grab at least five images of various deep sky objects with the Seestar. Here was the result of my Pinwheel imaging. It didn’t come out nearly as well as it could have, because my darks, for some reason, didn’t have the same pixel count on the files as my lights and Deep Sky Stacker refused to stack them. I also skipped taking flats. I didn’t want to disturb the others at the site with a bright white light, and the mosquitos had started eating my back. It’s also worth mentioning the field of view for the Hyperstar I’m using is huge. The Pinwheel Galaxy might take up 1/20 of the actually image space. This makes zooming in necessary at the cost of resolution.

While this is probably my best image of the Pinwheel Galaxy so far, I have to consider how much of a pain in the butt it was to get it. Meanwhile, the Seestar tooks images all night without an issue. And the only setup I needed to do for it was to take it outs of its case, attached the tripod, put it on a small folding table, and connect my tablet to it. It even has its own power supply, which remained above 50% battery life after a night of imaging. My tablet used even less of its battery life.

The Seestar just rocks.

The planet parade is starting soon and I’m looking forward to being able to setup at my home and really give my ZWO camera some work. Saturn’s ring are about to flatten relative to us and disappear from view. And Mars should be pretty close for some decent imaging if the Saharan dust stays away.

The Seestar S50 makes astrophotography simple. It’s nearly a push-button tool to take some decent pictures of distant celestial objects even when surrounded by city light pollution. ZWO produces it and it is controlled with their app on Android or iOS via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. All you need is a tablet or phone and a stable surface on which to set the Seestar.

I received mine as a Christmas gift. It costs about as much as a PlayStation at $500 but rolls together features that would normally cost much more than that and require hours of experience processing images to produce similar results. I’ve been using it in my yard and took it once to the local observatory to demonstrate it. I captured a video short of it in action. It’s not super thrilling to watch it move to a target, but it gives an idea of its compact size, portability, and how it looks while in operation.

It weighs only 8lbs and fits inside a small foam case provided with it. In some sense, it’s too compact. During the demo at the local observatory, lots of people kept walking in front of it while it was imaging because they either couldn’t see where it was pointed or didn’t understand what part of it was pointed.

Setting up the Seestar involves little more than attaching the tripod, turning it on, connecting it to the app, and then telling it to align itself so it can go to objects. So long as the Seestar has line of sight with stars, it performs the alignment automatically. This is such a huge time saver over performing manual 3-star alignments with larger computerized scopes and mounts. The app then provides a list of recommended objects for the night but lets you search its library for many more, including comets, which is nice.

It comes with some neat bult-in features like a light pollution filter that can be turned on or off and is mechanical and internal to the Seestar; a built-in dew heater than can be turned on or off depending on how much you want to conserve battery life; a solar filter to attach to the outside of the scope; and the ability to change exposure times from 10s to 20s to 30s. I’ll get more into the exposure time aspect further down in this blog.

As just a telescope, it’s not especially powerful as far as magnification. While it is capable of some planetary imaging, don’t expect amazing results, especially with anything smaller than Saturn.

It performs great with the Moon, but you’re limited to this perspective. Unless you want to zoom in on the image, you’re not getting any close-up views of other features.

The Seestar, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t perform image stacking on planetary imaging and Moon imaging (and presumably Sun imaging, which I haven’t tried). What you see is what you get when you take photos of those objects.

As far as the deepsky imaging, the Seestar displays a live imaging once it acquires a target. When you’re ready to take an image, it switches over to its live stacking mode. For the uninitiated, this means the scope begins to take picture after picture and combines them by finding the best average of each pixel from the images. This produces fine details and highlights otherwise dim aspects of the images.

Messier 42 Orion Nebula captured by Seestar S50.

Depending on the exposure settings selected in the advanced options, it begins taking 10/20/30s exposures of the target and live stacking them. You can watch the image of a practically invisible object come to life on your phone or tablet screen. After about 5 minutes of data collection, you typically can make out the target. This data collection time can take longer than 5 minutes because the Seestar software identifies star trailing and boots bad images automatically instead of stacking them. I’ve run it on a single image for over half an hour and there does seem to be a limit to how much more detail you can wring out of object. Clearer, darker skies contribute to this, of course.

NGC 2359 Thor’s Helmet captured by Seestar S50.

This is also where the exposure setting becomes important. I’ve experimented with exposure times greater than the default 10s setting, but I keep running into the same two issues. First, it takes forever to capture data because any slight vibration or bump to the scope will cause star trails and the image will get discarded at the end of the exposure. So, a strong breeze or even tapping the controlling tablet if it is placed on the same table as the Seestar can delay the final result another frame. Second, the images get noisy. While you can adjust the sensitivity of the scope/ISO, expect to see lots of those off-colored green/yellow/red hues in your images. Maybe this improves with better skies and less light pollution, but I haven’t been able to take it out to a dark site, yet, to find out for certain.

Messier 31 Andromeda Galaxy captured by Seestar S50.

The Seestar does all the stacking and image captures onboard and sends the final result to your phone or tablet. So, it has its own onboard storage and someone using it heavily will need to connect it time to time and move the images off the Seestar through a USB cable. The benefit of this is your phone or tablet isn’t being deluged with imaging data. Once you end the imaging session or take a single picture, as is the case with the Moon or planets, the images save to your phone/tablet image gallery as a JPG. I’m not certain if the output file type can be changed, but if it can that would be beneficial for photo editing veterans.

The final image also includes borders and branding identifying it as coming from the Seestar. I could see this be annoying for some people but it can be cropped out easily. One benefit of this is the data collection time and object ID are saved on these borders. When I’m not attempting serious, dark-site level imaging of an object and I just want to look at things and take pictures, this saves me the embarrassment of forgetting what I was even looking at and not being able to identify the object.

Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy captured by Seestar S50.

To summarize all of this, I like the Seestar but I’m of two minds about it. While it makes astrophotography simple and approachable for so many people, it’s not suited for people that want to get into the hobby seriously or are already veterans. For them, it’s a toy. Also, if this is the only scope someone has, there is something lost by not being able to see the night sky optically and not on a tablet screen. It creates a layer of unreality, like taking a virtual tour of a location instead of visiting the location.

NGC 2175 Monkey Head Nebula captured by Seestar S50.

However, the Seestar is the best way to bring space to the masses. Schools, observatories, libraries, etc., can use this tool (with a little A/V work) to show people the things in the sky they can either no longer see due to light pollution or could never see with just their eyes. People can learn about the different objects, the seasonality of some of them, and how things in the sky move.

The device also appeals to many of us that want to check out what’s happening in the night sky but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a full astrophotography rig or driving out to a dark site. You can plop this little thing down in your yard (Christmas lights/streetlights/parking lot lights be damned), sit on your porch, and sip a beer while you watch it image a galaxy.

Tag: astrophotography

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