Seestar S50 questions

[Sgt Pepper]

 just purchased the Seestar S50 the other day and have been watching loads of Youtube videos on it.

This is my first time maybe having a go at imaging and I know the Seestar does a lot of the hard work for you but I have seen in just about every video that the image can be Improved on a PC using certain programs now to someone who is completely useless on computers it all seems very confusing to me. Is there any where I can get a step by step easy to follow tutorial on getting the pics from the Seestar to the PC and then improving the picture etc in very very easy to follow steps.😵‍💫

Many thanks in advance.🙂

Edited February 3 by Sgt Pepper

[TerryMcK]

Hi Barry. I’ve seen the Seestar but don’t really know much about how it works other than what I have seen on Youtube. There might be somebody on here who has one that knows if it is possible to improve on what it does internally.

 

Essentially in astrophotography many pictures are taken whilst aiming at the subject over a period of hours, days or even longer. This process is known as data acquisition.

These pictures are transferred to a computer and are run through a “stacking” program that puts each photo on top of the last, aligning the stars so they are the same. Gradually the image gets better and better improving the signal to noise ratio.

I’m guessing the Seestar does that internally using its own on-board computer. I know that it takes 10 second duration photos which is probably about the limit it can do with the AltAz mount it uses to avoid star trailing.

 

Then the image is further processed manually in a program like Photoshop or similar programs, some of which are free, to produce the pictures you may have already seen of the cosmos.

 

On the Seestar I’m not sure the many 10 sec duration photos are easily transferred to a computer but if it uses an onboard memory card to store those then it probably is possible. If so you can learn the stacking process and image manipulation post processes. Trevor Jones at Astrobackyard.com has a lot of tutorial videos on Youtube linked from his website showing generic basic to advanced astrophotography processing methods. As the Seestar is very new he probably won’t cover that but the principles once you have obtained the data and got them onto a computer are the same. 

 

Don’t expect to produce APOD quality images from the Seestar though. The sensor (camera) and optics are relatively small and it is designed to produce images for a mobile phone or tablet in real-time. Great for outreach showing people live images as they come in over a relatively short period of time.

 

Looking forward to seeing your progress on here and lots of us can help with the processing if not the actual transfer from the Seestar.

[Sgt Pepper]

Thank you so much for your reply Terry and I will take your advice.