Dec 26, 20232 min read

Photos from SeeStar S50

Updated: Dec 26, 2023

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