Random Hints
- A kitchen blender cover makes a great Seestar cover. Some have pockets for solar filter, power bank, cables, etc.
- Seestar has a built-in celestial coordinate system that you can manually sync with the actual coordinate system, for really accurate GoTo. Turn on 'Skyatlas Sync' in 'Advanced Features.' After manually centering your target, tap the Sync button to make the two coordinate systems consistent.
- Trying to find the sun? When you insert the orange solar filter, make sure the tab is pointed straight up. There's a small hole in it. When you are pointed directly at the sun, you'll see a bright spot behind it on your scope's housing.
- Rapid iteration means Seestar software changes frequently. Ignore old complaints or bad ratings about early software or firmware releases. It’s easy to panic about some seemingly horrible problem only to find out it was an issue a year ago but isn’t now.
- Beware advice from a poster child for the Dunning-Krueger effect 1). They’re often, but by no means always, one of the most prolific posters on social media.
- I know it’s old-fashioned, but the more your read about astronomy and astrophotography the more you’ll enjoy and appreciate the Seestar. Imagine if tbis was your asgtroimaging setup. (Note the guy inside the body.
- There are oodles of YouTube videos about the Seestar, astronomy, and astrophotography. Some are exceptionally good. Some are exceptionally bad. You can usually tell that they will be good if the presenter doesn’t spend 10 minutes yapping about themself or irrelevant stuff before getting to the topic.
Planetary imaging is not one of Seestar’s strengths because of its short focal length. But if you focus carefully, adjust the gain carefully, and process carefully using drizzle 2)3)to combine multiple images, improving resolution and detail, you can produce some decent, even good, planetary images.
- The orange solar filter that comes with the Seestar is called a white light filter because it passes the full spectrum of visible light, not because the light it produces is white (because it isn’t, it's orange).
- Filters made with silver Baader AstroSolar Safety Film produce a slightly blueish image from white sunlight. If you make your own be sure not to install the film by stretching if (that causes distortions.) The sign of a properly installed Baader filter is small wrinkles.
- Use the the crack between Seestar's telescope arm (known in the trade as the OTA or Optical Tube Assembly) and the body as a sight to help you find scenery targets and the moon. You can use the same technique to find the Sun, but don't look through the crack at the Sun, just look for it in the telescope's shadow.
Up-to-date AI4) can be a huge help when you don't understand something. Here are five hints Gemini provided in response to the prompt, “Give me five hints to make Seestar easier to use.”
- Plan Your Observing Sessions: Use planetarium software or apps (such as free Stellarium) to identify interesting targets and their visibility in your location.
- Level Your Tripod Carefully: Ensure your tripod is level before starting your session. This will improve tracking accuracy and image quality. That said, in Stargazing (DSO) Mode, Horizontal Calibration eliminates the need for all but rough leveling.
- Utilize the Auto Focus: The Seestar S50 has manual focus capability, but the autofocus feature is quite reliable. Use it each time before you start imaging a target.
- Experiment with Exposure Settings: Depending on your target and sky conditions, you might need to adjust exposure settings (the plus and minus button) for optimal results. Don't be afraid to experiment!
- Use a Larger Screen: The Seestar app on a phone is convenient for controlling the telescope, using a tablet instead can make viewing and adjusting settings much easier. The “joystick” button, for one thing, is not smack in the middle of the screen.
They aren't earthshaking revelations, and AI can sometimes be flat out wrong (it's called hallucinating), but they are reasonable hints. It does better explaining concepts you may not know or understand. See footnotes two and three, straight from the AI horse's server-farm mouth.
1)
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular subject overestimate their abilities.
2)
Drizzle is an image processing technique used in combination with dithering to combine multiple images, improving resolution and detail. Drizzle can be thought of as “drizzling” the information from each individual image onto a higher-resolution canvas, resulting in a sharper and more detailed final image. But it comes with a price: noise.
3)
Dithering is the act of shifting the telescope's pointing direction a few random pixels between each exposure. This technique is used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in astrophotography by averaging out fixed-pattern noise, hot pixels, and other artifacts that would otherwise remain in the same location on the sensor.
4)
ChatHPT was trained with data available through 2022. It's never heard of Seestar