Background
Having started learning about astrophotography at the beginning of 2024, it's been a bit of a wander through the various astrophotography 'rooms' trying different things. Each 'room' had its own attractions - but there are a great number of rooms. There is also a lot of 'advice' as to how, what and where astrophotography should be done. It is easy to be restrained from picking your own 'niche'.
A comment often heard from some quarters is 'why do astrophotography ?' After all, much better images could be downloaded from the 'net captured by professional telescopes. That's true - but that is missing the most important point (at least for me) - which is - those images are not my images. The wonderment that the photons from some object millions of light-years away have been captured in my backyard telescope and converted to pixels in my image is missing from a downloaded image.
I'm gradually finding my own 'niche' guided by some parameters...
- I know next to nothing about the night sky.
- Viewing through an eyepiece is not an option due to eyesight and posture issues.
- Polar aligning an equatorial mount is not an option due to eyesight, posture and light pollution (SCP doesn't have a Polaris). I tried and could never do it.
- Spending hours on post-processing with clever - but complicated - post-processing applications is not my idea of fun.
- My sky view is limited to the home block being almost covered by tall eucalypts and so about a 1/2 dozen different sites on the block are needed to get some coverage. Therefore, a permanent installation is not practicable.
So - for my situation the Seestar S50 is the best telescope option. It makes the time taken to find and observe targets amazingly short. In fact, within 5 minutes from walking out the door with Seestar S50 you can be acquiring data.
Post-Processing Pain
Spending hours post-processing the data to get the 'best' picture (the definition of which is not agreed upon anyway) - for me - slowly drains the wonderment and fun out of the exercise.
To this end I have spent a lot of time writing code to analyse the FITS format files output from the Seestar S50 for the purpose of perhaps coming up with a way to automatically post-process the data into an acceptable image. This exercise was largely successful - but still requires too much manual intervention.
Seestar S50 to the Rescue
One of the fantastic aspects of the Seestar S50 is the regular updates to the phone application and onboard Seestar S50 firmware. There are so many enhancements that cool new features/functions are easily overlooked. One of the cool new functions I overlooked is called 'Deep Sky Stacker'. Previously the exposures were stacked on the fly while the observation is in progress producing a single stacked FITS and a 'thin' JPG (really just a thumbnail). The functionality has now been extended such that - if the option is checked in 'Advanced Feature' - all the single RAW FITS exposure files are saved also. In Deep Sky Stacker all - or a subset - of those exposure files can be selected and stacked. Maybe there are some satellite trails on some of them - so these exposures can be excluded from the stack. You can even stack images taken of the same object taken on different nights - provided the hour angles are roughly the same.
In addition, the stacked image can be edited in-situ, with controls for denoising, brightness, contrast and saturation. The images can be 'downloaded' immediately to the phone - or exporting to Google Drive or Dropbox (but exporting is delayed until the phone is disconnected from the Seestar S50 and normal WiFi access is restored).
Below is an image of the Orion Nebula which has been processed entirely with the Seestar S50 phone app and the Seestar S50 firmware. I'm pretty happy with the result.
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| Orion Nebula (M42) Processed Entirely with the Seestar S50 Phone App and Onboard Firmware |
I will explore this functionality further.
