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 on tyjr scope's housing.

Rapid iteration means 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. But if you focus carefully, adjust the gain care-fully, and process carefully using drizzle ²⁾³⁾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.)) you can produce some decent, even good, planetary images.

The orange solar filter 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).

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 AI 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.”

1. Plan Your Observing Sessions: Use planetarium software or apps (such as free Stellarium) to identify interesting targets and their visibility in your location.
2. 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.
3. Utilize the Auto Focus: While the Seestar S50 has manual focus capability, the autofocus feature is quite reliable. Use it each time before you start imaging a target.
4. 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!
5. Use a Larger Screen: While the Seestar app is convenient for controlling the telescope, connecting to a tablet can make viewing and adjusting settings much easier.

They aren't earthshaking revelations (and AI can sometimes be flat out wrong (it's called hallucinating) but they are reasonamable 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. — Tom Harnish 2024/06/25 10:35