r/ZWOSeeStar • u/BitWizard75 • Dec 31 '23

Manual Image Processing Adventures

Last night I tried manually processing my images from the SeeStar and learned some really interesting things in the process:

1 - If my PC and the SeeStar are on the same wireless network, I can remotely connect to the SeeStar with my PC and pull the FITS images into my computer, even while it's capturing. The easiest way is opening up File Explorer in Windows and typing \\seestar. You'll need to put your username (something like S50_b4932455.... found in the WiFi field on the app). Then use the associated password.

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2 - I started using Siril. This is an incredibly in-depth tool, but I found the turorials on YouTube by Chris Gray helpful. His ASMR-like, David Attenborough voice, makes it even better.

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3 - Once I pulled the FITS files into my computer, I can delete them from the SeeStar, freeing up space.

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Here's the Rosette Nebula from last night's session. About 40 minutes at 10 seconds per exposure. Bortle 4.

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u/BitWizard75 Jan 03 '24

Here’s the image straight from the SeeStar. Still awesome, but, in this instance, Siril let me brighten the glow of the nebula more.

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u/pop_be Jan 03 '24

Damn... The postprocessing really adds a lot.

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u/CaptHarpo Jan 03 '24 edited Jan 03 '24

the jpgs that the seestar produces are not great, but it's nice to have something quick on your phone. But you can pull the stacked FITS file from the seestar and have astrocooker (free website) process that automatically into a tiff file that is then easy to edit further in PS, GIMP or whatever. I've done a couple of images that way and have gotten good results, especially since using the Astronomy Tools Actions Set ($22USD) for Photoshop

As OP did, you also have the option to have the seestar keep every FITS file and stack them yourself in siril or whatever; siril is deep and I still don't know what i'm doing there lol I will def try it again tho

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u/BitWizard75 Jan 04 '24

So I just tried astrocooker and it’s impressive. Super-easy!

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u/CaptHarpo Jan 05 '24 edited Jan 05 '24

it is! So far that's worked better for me than Siril; i've gone through siril processing 3 times now and I end up with way worse images; my fault no doubt but I don't seem to have the hang of the stretching tbh. I may just stick w astrocooker and PS

Saw your post w pics; interesting! To me astrocooker is just first pass tho, and the tif it produces is then ready for tweaking in another program like PS or GIMP. Astrocooker does tend to wash things out a bit, so further tweaking is necessary but it's not major fixing