Seestar S50 - I joined the group

[Ben Cartwright SASS]

I heard about the Seestar on FB and it looked interesting. Being over 70 the thought of having to load half my Jeep with gear for a star party or outreach meant I pretty much stopped doing them.
After watching some youtube videos and reading about them on a couple FB S50 groups I decided what the heck, it is only $500, about like taking the entire family out to dinner nowadays.
Being that it is about 20F here i decided to try it out my open den window, tried it with the window closed but didn't like it. Everything fits in a small case, although I added a camera bag for my power tank and some wires and junk, but two bags and I am there.
Setup is super easy, about 5 minutes total from opening the case to observing. I am very tree challenged here but there is about a 15 degree gap to the SW.

Naturally we have had 2 weeks of solid clouds until Saturday night when it cleared up for a few hours. M42 took about 30 minutes to clear from one side of the opening to the other but I was amazed at the image I got. It provides both a stacked image and the individual fits images to work yourself.
Yes maybe I could do better with my Skywatchers or Celestron scopes but for ease of use and outreach it is a winner

Here are the images I got, the first is the stacked image provided by the Seestar and the other two are two different processing of the fits data, the first was with no LP filter and second with the LP filter (just wanted to see what it would do)

[messier 111]

nice set , thx .

[Graeme1858]

The unprocessed, no filter version is really quite good. Even a hint of Trapezium.

Nice one.

Graeme

[Ben Cartwright SASS]

The unprocessed, no filter version is really quite good. Even a hint of Trapezium.

Nice one.

Graeme

Yes I am amazed at what you can get with this scope, now we just need a few clear nights

[jrkirkham]

Thank you for sharing your images. Many of us are curious about how this new generation of scopes performs.

[Greenman]

Nice work, the Seestar does a good job I'd be interested to know the gain and subs length you used, also did you use manual darks for the processing work?

[Ben Cartwright SASS]

Nice work, the Seestar does a good job I'd be interested to know the gain and subs length you used, also did you use manual darks for the processing work?

I think it does dark automatically with DSO's. I just tracked M42 and let it run. for the processed ones I just did minimal tweaks in LR

[Ben Cartwright SASS]

After watching a youtube about the S50 I decided to try stacking in the Seestar and then put into Topaz Gigapixel to increase the size and tweak in Lightroom. I think it is better than my first try, it is using all the fits images rather than my first try with the Seestar partial stack. I am going to try it again as some of the subs weren't focused that great.

[Gordon]

I got my SeeStar about a month ago. As is normal the clouds have NOT been allowing me too much time to use it.

We just added a M110 contest for EAA scopes, if you would like to give it a try.

https://theskysearchers.com/viewforum.php?f=135