Yes I saw an online comparison between the Vespera II and the Seestar. While the Vespera II certainly appeared to show slightly better work on DSO's, I'm not sure I could convince myself it was worth the price difference. I'm an absolute gumby when it comes to processing (I sold my ZWO 224 as it was too much stuffing about), so the amount of effort involved in setting up and processing with the Seestar seems right up my alley. Your shots are great regardless, but even moreso considering they're taken on something less expensive than the cost of a quality visual eyepiece.
…I'm a bit of a chicken putting my shots up here because I know that they can't possibly ever compare to the amazingly detailed shots that I drool over from the other guys here . Still, for what it's worth, here's some more examples of what you could get out of your Seestar when you buy it
Thanks mate. I'm looking forward to ZWO introducing the mosaic feature to reduce the loss of real estate due to field rotation. It's not going to help acquisition times at all but the final results should be worth it.
I recently watched a youtube where the SeeStar sourced many hours of data that enabled the detection and measurement of the variable light curve of a few asteroids.
For me as a traveling observer and astrophotographer it would be nice. Right now I am in South Africa and using my heavy rig (110mm ED and Canon EOS R6) with pleasure. So a Seestar is tempting. Lightweight.
But there are some disadvantages.
* I'd rather wait for a Seestar without the scope, I mean a kind of camera + plate solver built in a device which can be popped into any telescope making a smart scope of it. Obviously, it has to have an EQ mount but I want to forgo the Goto for a far more flexible approach.
Welcome aboard!!! I'll look forward to seeing your first images Patrick
Cheers. I have no idea what (free) processing software would be best, but I'll just try to get a few images straight off the device before I try to get clever.
For freebies, you could try grabbing Siril to see if it's any good for you mate. It's not the most intuitive software, but there are lots of tutorials on Youtube to help you along. Grab Starnet2 while you're at it as it works with Siril. You might want to get GraXpert 2.2.2 as well. It's incorporated into Siril, but I've found that the standalone version is better. Those might be good apps for starters anyway.
For freebies, you could try grabbing Siril to see if it's any good for you mate. It's not the most intuitive software, but there are lots of tutorials on Youtube to help you along. Grab Starnet2 while you're at it as it works with Siril. You might want to get GraXpert 2.2.2 as well. It's incorporated into Siril, but I've found that the standalone version is better. Those might be good apps for starters anyway.
Cheers Dean, I meant to thank you earlier for this info.
My pleasure mate! How did you go getting / installing those apps?
I had a vaguely successful Seestar imaging night the other night. None of my results were much to write home about. I'm colour blind, and my chief-colour-engineer went to bed before I could get any QA done lol.
I managed to nab M104 low in the sky, NGC3201 (interesting because of its association with black holes) and NGC3247 with IC2581. Avert your eyes if the colours are odd My colour engineer will be back on the job for my next run!
My pleasure mate! How did you go getting / installing those apps?
I had a vaguely successful Seestar imaging night the other night. None of my results were much to write home about. I'm colour blind, and my chief-colour-engineer went to bed before I could get any QA done lol.
I managed to nab M104 low in the sky, NGC3201 (interesting because of its association with black holes) and NGC3247 with IC2581. Avert your eyes if the colours are odd My colour engineer will be back on the job for my next run!
Those colours look fine to this untrained eye. I haven't tried those apps yet, I'll probably look at them over the weekend. I assume you download the images from the seestar/phone/tablet to your pc to use them? I dare say I'll work it out after a bit of faffing about.
You can hook your Seestar up to your PC via the USB connection, and turn the Seestar on to transfer files. You can also do it over WiFi but USB might be the most direct way for you to transfer files and probably the fastest.
If you're set up in Station mode, and can hook up to a 5Ghz link on your network you could transfer at decent rates over WiFi too. You just need to grab your Seestar IP address from the RTSP Address GET button under Advance Feature. You can then remote mount the Seestar as a network drive.
Don't forget to go into Advanced Feature and turn on Save Each Frame In Enhancing so that the Seestar collects individual frames.
I tried my first 2-panel mosaic last night on IC2944 just to see if it was possible or if I would end up in trouble. I think it's probably turned out OK. It needed double the acquisition time of course, and double the processing but it gets around the problem of the narrow format of the Seestar for larger objects.
Having never imaged this object before, I wasn't sure if the stitching was actually correct so I uploaded the finished file to Astrometry to see if the plate solve would work. To my amazement, it solved.
These images aren't straight out of the box though . I'm getting much more bloated star images . What is your most common workflow ?
That's true. I'm navigating the long and winding path of post processing. Still very new to it though. This is what I've been doing to date. It's pretty basic but it's where I'm at. I'm not sure that I really want to do much more with a Seestar shot:
Move the lights (fits format) into a subdir hanging off the directory I've set up for the object (eg. .../NGC3199/lights)
Open Siril
Click the Home icon in the tool bar and set the home directory to the root directory for the object (eg. .../NGC3199)
Run the script called OSC_PREPROCESSING_WITHOUT_DBF (as the darks have been applied by the Seestar and there are no bias or flat calibration files to use)
Open the result.fit file in the home directory
Click on Autostretch, and the Unlink button next to it to do a screen stretch
Perform a background extraction if you're not using GraXpert. Whether you do it here or later depends on how your noise reduction will handle an extracted source. Seems to depend on the subject for me. Galaxies always seem to be a lot more difficult.
Remove green noise
Perform deconvolution
Perform photometric colour calibration
Save where you're up to under a new name
Jump into linear mode
Perform Starnet star removal
Perform Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch on foreground, and background. More than once if it's a delicate subject, working on it incrementally
Save the Without Stars version under a new name for later
Load the Starmask file and work on saturation to try to get the star colours right
Save the Starmask off under a new name
Go into Star Recomposition
Load the Without stars version, and the Starmask version and blend to taste
Save the final file as FITS and also PNG
Open the PNG in photoshop and work on file with NoiseXTerminator
Adjust curves and balance image as required
Save as PNG
If you didn't do a background extraction earlier, you can move to GraXpert and do it now. It's unusual for me to do this step last, but I get pretty bad banding with some Seestar shots and extracting the background early on gives me useless results with NoiseXTerminator.
I've seen another fellow on YouTube splitting the colours, and recombining them using RGB Image Compositing. He dumped the blue (I think) and substituted the Red channel into both Red and Blue, and also into Luminance and converted it to a CIE L*a*b Composition. His results were OK, but when I did it I wasn't happy. It may be a much better way to go but I haven't done much with it.
Anyway, take a crack at this simple workflow to see if you can make any progress with it in Siril.
Yes! Another one joins the gang! Welcome aboard Kon My poor C9.25 rig and my refractor rig are getting very jealous of the sky time my Seestar is getting.
