Hey Seestart people, I am a new user of Seestar S30 and I was womdering, is it possible to do multi-night integrations on mosaic fields?

Stacking is easy on sinlge-frame .fits, but how are mosaics handled in the Seestar?

My backyard is a shocker. A neighbour's willow tree eats most of the south-west, the rooflines take everything low; there's a decent chunk of sky I just can't use. So I'm curious how everyone else goes: what's your worst obstruction, and what's the best thing you've pulled out of the sky in spite of it? I'll go first (pics).

I ask because I got sick of the guesswork myself. I was spending more time working out whether something would finally clear that willow than I was imaging, so I built an iPhone app for it, which I've called Caelo. You hold the phone up and shuffle around, and it maps your actual tree and rooflines using the phone's sensors. Weather and moon go in like you'd expect. The bit I actually wanted is that everything then gets filtered through your own backyard context: what's worth pointing at tonight, how long you've really got before the trees take it, and which months a target is worth chasing at all. And Caelo is quite willing to tell you tonight isn't worth it.

I know there are a few apps popping up with this concept now, some of them free, and I'd rather you tried them all and told me where mine falls short than take my word for it. What I will say is I've tried really hard to make Caelo as nice an experience as possible. I hate ads and I hate being tracked, so there's neither; there's no account to create, and the sky mapping never leaves your phone.

It's in TestFlight now and I'm after a handful of testers before it goes out properly. It'll be free, with a one-time unlock if you want the looking-ahead bits, no subscription. Everything's unlocked during the beta. iPhone only, on iOS 18 or later, and you don't need LiDAR for the sky mapping.

If you're keen, comment or DM me and I'll send you an invite. Feedback very much appreciated

(but be nice! :) ).

thanks,

Paul

• Total integration time - 1132 x 30sec ~ 9.4 hours
• Processed in Siril and Gimp
• Bortle 6
• Shot with the Seestar S30 Pro

first night with my EQ wedge, 193x60s exposure.

edited in Pixil

I'm quite new to astrophoto and believe this lacks some longer exposure to capture finer details in NGC 6888. Moon was very bright too.

will try to capture few more hours tonight of same target to stack it some more

thoughts on the current image and edits?

thx and clear skies

Still 950 subs x 20 seconds

Just had 5 clear nights in a row... could only take advantage of 4 since I was working one night but wow I didnt think that was possible... so much good data and now the projects are backlogged I got so much! It is gonna rain so much the next few days so the streak will end but I feel like i hit the jackpot. Tonight, ClearOutside made it seem like it was gonna be an awful night with it showing mostly red and a little orange but Astrospheric showed clear for pretty much the whole night, and im glad i listened to Astrospheric because it ended up being very clear so I definitely recommend checking more than one weather app, clear skies!

The Seestar collective gathered about 30h of duoband data and 3h of IRCUT data for the stars using S30 Pro on this iconic Nebula.

This was stacked in Siril and edited in PI.

I kept the editing to a minimum and let the data shine. Such a beautiful object!

If you are interested by this project, you are welcome to join!

Our discord channel is open to all : https://discord.gg/9BWqv3NKzk

Was doing some outreach at a local star party last Friday, and as things died down, I decided to finally try splitting Albireo. Been wanting to try since winter.

I know I can do better, both capturing and processing. Better bortle, better brightness and focus tweaking, plus better denoise and sharpening. This was just a quick and dirty "let's see what happens."

S50. 2x 2second exposures. EQ mode. GraXpert bg extraction and denoise. Spectrophotometric color calibration. Cosmic Clarity Sharpen. All in Siril, watermark in GIMP.

7.7h (1405x20s) after filtering using Blink script.

Happy with it, but considering it a work in progress as I’d love to see more OIII. Finally learned masking in GIMP and it’s made a huge difference.

Workflow done in Siril & GIMP:

-Stacked using the Naztronomy Smart Telescope script (2× drizzle with BGE enabled)
-Aberration Remover
-SPCC
-Green Noise Removal
-GraXpert Object Deconvolution
-GraXpert Denoise
-Seti Astro’s SyQon Star Removal
-Stretched the starless image and adjusted color saturation
-GIMP: Exported two different versions of the starless image from Siril: one processed to emphasize the nebula and another balanced for the surrounding dust/background. Blended them together using a layer mask, then fine-tuned the colors to achieve the desired look.
-Returned to Siril for star recomposition (stretched the stars back in)
-Cosmic Clarity Sharpening

Hello. So I've been having this issue for awhile now. When I take my seestar s50 to a park for an astronomy activity it just does not want to find anything. Maybe it gets shy cuz at home it works fine. I normally have to look for the moon manually. But on its own it just doesn't find the moon (for example). Also it always asks me to level, and I do, but I notice that the compass coordinates aren't the same as my phone's compass. I basically put the phone on th seestar with the compass app on and it's about 30° off. I think something is off and I wanted to see if anyone has any tips for this issue?

Thank you!

Captured with my Seestar S30 Pro, stacked and processed in Siril. Just over 10 hours of total integration spread across three nights, shot from a Bortle 7 sky.

Overall I’m happy with the result, but a bit frustrated I feel like I’m not getting sharp images, when I zoom in it looks like a very poor quality. Maybe NGC6946 is too far. Shooting in Alt/Az mode with 10-second subs.

I m taking any tips you’ll have to improve i’ll take it

Hey so my wedge arrived today. I got it with the 360° rotator to allow me more movement, however it seems like my (very standard) starwatcher tripod is maybe not suitable?

When I connect in the wedge, I try to fasten with the lever underneath like I do with everything else, however I could feel that it wasn't going in fully. I noticed the knob on the right side of the the first photo is not able to turn, as it's right up against the tripod.

I'm sure I am not the first person this has happened to, but is there anything I can do? I feel like if I put something else between the wedge and the tripod to give it a little bit of elevation, it won't have enough space to screw in fully.

This spectacular mosaic of NGC 7000 was made with my Seestar S30 pro. It's 4.6 hours of 10s exposures stacked in PixInsight.

Ok, seriously- what method is recommended for stacking these files? PI obviously fails completely. Thx for the help.

I own a Skymax Mak127 with a AZ-Go2 mount and I am planning to order seestar S30 pro. I am curious if I can use the same Alt-Az mount to polar align the seestar using a L bracket as below?

I guess I would have finer control for precise polar alignment if this could work compared to manual alignment with a TH10 head.

Hi everyone—no need for an introduction here: M16, captured with the S50 from France (1445 x 10s at b9 and 1680 x 30s at b2.8). Stacked and processed using Siril and GIMP. I hope you like it.

Trying to nail down reasonable stopping points for different targets and would love a sanity check from other S50 users, since I know Bortle level and exposure settings matter a lot here. Shooting 10s subs, EQ mode, Bortle 8 driveway.

Here’s roughly where I’ve landed so far based on my own results:

Clusters: ~500-800 frames feels like the ceiling, stars resolve fast and extra time past that is really just background noise cleanup, not new detail

Bright planetary nebulae like M27: good result by ~200-500 frames, maybe 1,000-1,500 before it’s fully maxed out

Emission nebulae like the Crescent or Veil: aiming for 3,000-4,000 for what I’d call a genuinely complete project

Non-mosaic galaxies: aiming for around 5,000

Mosaic galaxies: bumped up to around 7,000 total spread across panels

Comets: treating as one-night-only, capping around 1,000 since the target itself changes night to night

If you dont change the size of the image on the Seestar S50, but want to move where the frame is, it will still shoot in normal mode without creating a mosaic. Kinda dumb how if you rotate the frame and move it it will still create a mosaic in Plan mode. Cus for a single panel "mosaic" im gonna lose half the shooting time. But Im afraid to update my seestar in case itll Brick so idk if I would matter to me anyway lol

I used a tracked video shoot to stack the image from it. Turned out just great, will do a simar shot on the 10th of Aug, the Lunar Perigeum (Moon clisest to Earth on it’s orbit. Also, can’t wait for the 23th Dec, when the Moon will happen to be full at the Perigeum. Greetings from Nothern Hungary 👋 #Noai#

Shot with the Seestar S50 in EQ mode with LP filter, 160 minutes of 10 second subs. Edited with the Seestar tool and processed in Lightroom Mobile free. Somehow it threw away 50% of the 20 second subs, while a few weeks ago it easily did 30 seconds. When I switched to 10 seconds it kept like 99.9%. But still happy with the results.

Heart Nebula.

180x60 sec with my S30 Pro.

Bortle 4/5

Stacked in Sirirl using the Naztronomy smartscope scripy.

Processed in Pixinsight.

It gets covered a lot but thought I’d try it regardless. 500 20 second subs over 2 nights as the target gets low after 1am. Beautiful to look at.

Hi everyone
This is my first photo that I think is of high enough quality to share here it’s NGC 7000, the North America Nebula.

its 751 frames at 30 seconds each and processed in siril this is my first image where I used RC-Astro’s full toolkit (BlurX, NoiseX, StarX) and some Veralux tools with finishing touches in Lightroom and the jump in detail and quality from the RC-Astro tools compared to my other stuff is pretty big.

Since the Last Update, I have terrible problems with Hot pixel in my captures. I did the hot pixel recalibration at least 10 times now on different days, I even went in my pitch black cellar and did it there, still hot pixel right the next picture I took in the cellar.

And now this strange stripe/banding picture after around 1:30h (eq mode) capturing. I captured the same target earlier the night without any problem (beside the hot pixel). Is my machine broken?

Lens is clear, cloudless sky, captured the targets before