Photos from SeeStar S50

The SeeStar S50 has a much better user interface than the Dwarf 2. The library of objects is more extensive than than the corresponding library in Dwarf 2 version V2.0.0 B70 (the latest update). Deep sky astrophotography is easy with the SeeStar S50. You can choose an object from the extensive catalog and it has a wonderful sky atlas that is seamlessly integrated within the app in so that you can see where your target is located. What is really outstanding is that you can also choose objects within the atlas to track and view.

The quality of the stacking software is excellent. Downloading the fits files to do your own photo processing can be challenging. A PC sees the SeeStar S50's hard disk as a USB drive. Both of my PC's wanted me to reformat the SeeStar S50 drive which is far from being sound. If someone blindly said yes, then the drive would be wiped clean and the SeeStar S50 would lose its operating system. So for heaven's sake do not allow the PC to reformat your SeeStar S50 drive!

I have a couple of apple products, a Macbook and an iPad. Attaching the SeeStar S50 by USB-C cable to the Macbook and iPad both work and SeeStar S50 drive was recognized. I was able to copy the data from the "MyWorks" file in SeeStar S50 to both the Macbook and iPad. Unfortunately, the high quality image generated by the SeeStar S50 stacking software is stored elsewhere (on the device which you used to control the SeeStar). You will not find a high quality image in the "MyWorks" file. "MyWorks" does store the fits files that were used by the SeeStar S50 stacking program. You can process these fits files from the SeeStar S50 with Siril, but you have to use the OSC_Preprocessing_WithoutDBF script since there are no stored darks. I found that the SeeStar S50's post processing is very good. I tried to improve upon it but there wasn't much difference. For comparison, below are the SeeStar S50's photos of most of the objects which I posted on Dec 21 taken with the Dwarf 2. The images were taken in a Bortle 6 sky. The runs were 30 minutes long. The SeeStar S50 shows great promise. If the runs were much longer and if I were better at post processing, I think the SeeStar S50 would produce excellent results. There is some very solid work from the SeeStar S50 groups on facebook as well as YouTube which you can check out.

In the meantime, I will keep hoping for clear skies to do more comparisons with longer runs. The weather has been bad for most of this month.

In conclusion, I think both the SeeStar S50 and Dwarf 2 are excellent units for anyone who wants to start out in astrophotography.

M33

M31

Rosette Nebula

Packman Nebula

Heart Nebula

Comet 62P Tsuchinshan

Spider Nebula

Tadpole Nebula

Flaming Star Nebula

California Nebula

M 42

M45 Pleiades

NGC 1491

NGC 2175

M1

M 97

Northern Trifid Nebula

Photos from Dwarf 2

The Dwarf 2 is easy to use but the pictures require photo processing. I used a combination of Siril, fits scrubber and adobe photoshop to process the images below. In my next post I will compare the results from the Dwarf 2, SeeStar S50 and eQuinox 2.

This is M33 the Triangulum Galaxy.

This is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, with M32.

This is the Rosette Nebula.

This is the Pacman Nebula.

This is the Heart Nebula.

This is the Horsehead Nebula with the Flame Nebula.

This is the comet 69P Tsuchinshan.

This is the California Nebula.

SeeStar File Location

My SeeStar S50 disk can't be read when connected to my PC by the USB cable. It shows up as a USB drive and when you try to open it, the message says it needs to be reformated. Clearly that is not an option otherwise you erase the contents of the drive. So in my case it is not possible to download the avi movies or images stored in the drive to my PC.

My goal was to process the S50 fit files on Siril (https://youtu.be/SyKw06fz8LU?si=ZuMwabC7VzZPSzyX) to see if I could improve the images. I contacted SeeStar support about the problem but did not get a response. In the past, when I had problems with unreadable disks, I would try to open it with an apple computer and that always seems to work. My only apple product is an iPad, so I tried it. The iPad was able to read the SeeStar S50 disk. I copied the files that I needed for processing and stored them on my Google drive. I was able to use my PC and Siril for further processing by accessing my Google drive. I found that the SeeStar S50 does a very good job of processing the images. I was not able to improve the quality.

In my previous post, I talked about trying to locate where the SeeStar S50 stored its high quality processed images. I could not find anything other than low quality processed images on the drive. I tried to contact SeeStar support about this issue and received no response. I did find a post where it discussed that the high quality images using the app on an Android phone can be found in the phone's internal storage in the DCIM folder. I was able to copy the images to my Google drive. (Thus the roundabout method of obtaining copies of the images from the SeeStar that I used for the previous post is not necessary.) Here are copies of the same images used in my previous post that were taken from the DCIM folder.