Starry Starry niiiiiight

Brave

Jogort I think you can do longer exposures but you’d need to align the telescope properly. For the moment I don’t need to go down that rabbit hole yet. I have enough expensive tripod heads 😉

I’ll dive into stacking software at some point, but want to get to grips with what it does on its own before I get stuck in.

Edit: also the mosaic function was what convinced me to go for the s50. I could still capture larger galaxies etc. and also get super detailed close up sun and moon images.

Brave

Andromeda Galaxy.

A little too much light pollution (from our kitchen window) but still not horrendous.

DrDamn

Brave was that stacked by the SeeStar App or externally? Very nice either way.

Jogort max of 10s exposure though is that right?

It can do 10, 20 or 30s but the longer exposures don’t work as well as it doesn’t have an equatorial mount.

Jogort

Very cool, I’ve not done much of Andromeda. It’s nice watching the live stack build up throughout the session. I do that with stellarmate OS running my setup.

Brave

DrDamn yeah. I just decided to let Seestar do everything just now. I want to understand what the basics can do before I start pressing extra buttons and using third party software. Although I know I’ll get stuck in to that at some point.

It has a built in dual band filter for light pollution but I purposely didn’t use that either (I think). Which is why I’m not 100% happy with the image. It’s cool but I know I can do a lot better. I want to see the difference between each setting so that I can be a bit more thoughtful about their use.

Apparently there are adapters for two inch filters which would improve things a lot. And I’ve already found a reasonably cheap filter should I want to dive deeper but that’ll need considerably more clear nights before it’s warranted.

It’s already pretty crazy given that it got that result with light streaming out of my kitchen and my wife triggering the neighbours unnecessarily bright and long lasting security light when she went out to put something in the bin. 😔

There’s supposed to be a couple of hours of clear sky again tonight so I’ll do the same thing tonight but try and locate the dual band option 😉

DrDamn

Brave very helpful of Andromeda to be that way up for you so it fits in the frame too 🙂

Jogort

How long was the total exposure of the final image? You’re already in the rabbit hole just by starting with it 🤣
These were a couple of short exposures with my old planetary camera on my scope
I think the second one was the start of a stack but clouds came to spoil the party

Jogort

Oh to add, this site is great for checking how targets fit in your camera/scope setup. It has Seestar in the choices. Choose imagine mode, pick the target, choose the scope then camera and it’ll show how it fits in. Can have several options at once to see the difference between cameras/scopes
https://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/

Comparison of Seestar50 and my scope/camera

Gammerz

So what sort of images do you see just looking through the telescope without the software image enhancements?

Jogort

Gammerz that depends on various things, quality of scope, type of scope, quality of eye pieces, magnification of eye pieces, sky darkness, atmospheric conditions.
I can see Orion nebula with mine but I rarely use it for visual, usually just imaging. Most of these pictures are not “enhanced” they’re just stacked for super long exposure and camera noise & gradients removed. I hope to get a 2nd (better) refractor scope for imaging at some point and will use my original one for visual more.

Gammerz

Jogort But comparing like with like, with same equipment setup and conditions, if the Andromeda galaxy looks well defined with software, do you see a similar quality image though the eyepiece, or does it just appear as a fuzzy patch, or something significantly poorer? I guess I’m asking “what did you actually see?”, not “what did the software display?”. When you look through the telescope, your eye is actually sampling the light from the galaxy. When you look at at a photo, you’re not.

Jogort

Gammerz been a while since I’ve used it for visual on the likes of Andromeda so hard to say but you can see it even with just basic binoculars as a bit more than a fuzzy patch. Of course the finer details you just won’t see with the eye unfortunately, we can’t do long eye exposures 🤪

Jogort

Erm…..so I got a bonus at work….may have bought a Seestar 🤣
This wee thing is brilliant, I’ll be taking it to work with me, only just over 3kg in it’s weird box.
First light with it last night, a bit rushed as just home from The Netherlands but it was very clear and windy which didn’t seem to bother it at all.
Anyway, couldn’t get the bloody thing to connect to my phone at all, tried all sorts of recommendations found on google etc but nothing, Pulled out the old tablet and it worked straight away.
So quick setup and got some images. 46 minute mosaic of Pleiades (M45), no tweaking as I didn’t let the mosaic finish apparently so it won’t even run a denoise if it’s unfinished, so it’s just a stack.

Horsehead & Flame, just a quick 3 minutes stack to see how it would come out, never tried with my main scope on this target, looks like with more time it’ll be decent.

And the ol fav, Orion Nebula, first is just a 2 minute stack, second is a bit longer and then processed and colour corrected in Pixinsight

What an absolutely brilliant bit of kit, I’ll be taking this onboard with me and also using it alongside my main setup as it’s so easy to just set it going and forget about it. Great to watch the live stack progress also.
I like that the app has a small social aspect to it, can see images from others nearby if they post them up.

SRR

And at the numty end of the scale, but still nice to see.
I give you a very hastily taken shot of the Moon & Venus…. 😂
Took this last week about 4pm in the heart of the City Of London. It was amazing how bright Venus was to the naked eye.

DrDamn

SRR I clocked the moon and bright “star” next to it the other day. Did not realise it was Venus though 🤦

Jogort

DrDamn very good time for planet sighting just now, Venus & Saturn are close together, Jupiter, Mars are also quite visible

Gammerz

I knew it was a planet but was surprised it was Venus because it was quite high in the sky - it’s usually closer to the Sun and horizon…

Brave

The star Tejat although I was more interested in the stellar dust behind it.

I’m beginning to understand some more basic but important aspects of the hobby. Simple things like what part of the sky, in my little suburban neighbourhood with some posh flats in the way, do I have the best chance of staying with a target for the longest.

I’ve figured out I have a little arc of sky from SE to SW and I can obviously get a lot more time with higher targets.

I’ve bought an app called Stellarium with an AR mode that really helps figure it out. I can point my phone at that patch of sky and fast forward through time and pick my targets for that night.

I still messed up a bit last night and ran out of time for a couple of mosaics. But I did manage to get this. Still not up to any reasonable standard but I’m starting to look into stacking software now.

Jogort

Brave nice shot.
Stellarium is brilliant and it’s free on PC. I think you can even link it to the Seestar, I can with my main scope so I can see in Stellarium where it’s pointing.
Yeah getting a good idea of your viewing window helps, I was doing a mosaic on Andromeda the other night and started to get some trees poking in late into the mosaic. Thankfully it had filled the mosaic already and was just adding extra.
I imagine you have it set up save the individual fits files not just the final image. You can then go and stack in the app yourself and remove any bad images beforehand. Or use in external software like deepskystacker (free and easy) etc.
The good thing about keeping the individual files is you can keep adding data over several nights to bring out more detail in the final stack.

Brave

In Siril I tried to bring out a little more of the dust and allowed Siril to tell me what colour Tejat should really be. It’s a red giant so I’m guessing it’s pretty spot on. I’m going to spend the next decent clear night entirely focussed on it so I can get a bit better signal to noise. i can’t stand any noise in my main work, so that’s proving to be an issue with astrophotography 😅

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