During the first setup, you mobile phone or tablet tickles the Seestar’s Bluetooth (because no configuration is required) and then Seestar’s firmware ask you a few questions to configure the built-in Wi-Fi hotspot and you’re in business—even in the middle of nowhere with no local Wi-Fi network or cellular service. This process works very well, and instructions are clear.

But what if you’re at home and want to use your local Wi-Fi network at the same time as you're controlling the Seestar? Station Mode is the answer. Press then Me button, bottom right menu item on the Home Screen, then tap the Wi-Fi button. Pick the Wi-Fi network you want to use, enter your ID and password, and now the Seestar is just another node (station) on that network. You can surf the web on your mobile device while you stay connected to your Seestar. The Seestar will look like an external hard drive, and that’s where you’ll find the images and video files the Seestar saved for you. With Station Mode you can even live stream what your capturing to a smart TV in the living room, and to Facebook, or YouTube using free Open Broadcast Software (OBS) which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Okay, you can tell the Seestar what to do from your phone/tablet and also surf the web. Cool. Now what? In a limited sense, you can just plop the Seestar down, turn it on, and start capturing images—limited in the sense that it will only really work using Stargazing (DSO) mode.

The Seestar knows where it is (your mobile device told it), it knows what time it is (ditto), it has a built in compass so it knows where it’s pointed¹⁾, and it will figure out where the horizon is with Horizontal Calibration, no finicky leveling required. If you tell it you want to image, say, the Whirlpool Nebula (M51), the Seestar will slew to where it thinks it should be, take a picture, perform some magic using plate solving so it knows where it actually is looking, do some quick spherical trigonometry calculations to compute where it needs to go, and then repoints the scope. It will keep doing that until M51 is centered in the camera’s view.

In another case of YMMV, some Seestar owners will insist you have to carefully level the telescope and recalibrate the compass every session. If you want to find the Sun or Moon it does have to be level²⁾. But to capture images of DSOs (deep sky objects), plate solving will do the job. When you’re hunting DSOs, it automatically does a horizontal calibration using a three star plate solve to compensate if your leveling is off, and then it goes to your target.

Regardless of my opinion and experience, or anyone else’s, if the Seestar isn’t happy because the internal sensor say it isn’t level, it will pop up a screen with two white circles that you are supposed to overlap by adjusting 5the Seestar so it’s level. Why they didn’t use a graphic representation of a plain old bubble level is beyond me.

You can fiddle with the tripod legs (or that leveler add-on thingy on page xx) to get the two circles to overlap. When you’re close, the circles will turn green. Try to get the number down to 0.5 or less.