Solar with the Seestar S50

JimFox

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
I bought a new ZWO Seestar S50 Smart Telescope. I by no means plan on getting rid of my other Astro gear, but this will be a nice addition to my gear. If someone is looking to get into Astrophotography, this could make for a good starting point.

One of it's features is the ability to do Solar imaging. They include a Solar filter in the setup. So yesterday I was able to take it out and get it figured out how to do Solar. While it is a Smart Telescope, it's totally brand new, so there are still improvements to be made to it, to make it a little smarter. :)

One of my hopes with this is to be able to use it during the next Solar Eclipse in April. And from my testing yesterday, that looks like it will work great. For Solar, it has 3 modes, you can take a photo, you can do a video, and you can do timelapses. The timelapse option will be perfect for the eclipse.

I should have taken notes as to how many frames this was, but it was a video of the sun taken through Autostakkert to stack the best frames.

All comments are welcome,

Jim

2023-11-14-152723-Solar_dw.jpg
 
kiwiapple

kiwiapple

Well-Known Member
I ordered mine in mid-September after seeing one in action at the star party I attended near here. The local ZWO guy (who is one of their English-language tech support folks) had one with him so that was my first time seeing it in action, and I was duly impressed enough to order one. Interestingly enough, I did not really expect it to come quickly or anything, given the enormous popularity of the thing when it first came out, but last week I thought to ask ZWO when I might happen to see mine come, and the response I got was that my original order had sort of gone into limbo due to an error kicked up by DHL! They were nice enough not to make me join the end of the queue though, and immediately shipped one out, and I had it in my hands today, scarcely a week after that interaction!

It really is an amazing little device--I set it up within a few minutes of its arrival and before long was imaging the sun, too!
jg-20231115--9083-LargeJPEG.jpg
 
JimFox

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
kiwiapple said:
I ordered mine in mid-September after seeing one in action at the star party I attended near here. The local ZWO guy (who is one of their English-language tech support folks) had one with him so that was my first time seeing it in action, and I was duly impressed enough to order one. Interestingly enough, I did not really expect it to come quickly or anything, given the enormous popularity of the thing when it first came out, but last week I thought to ask ZWO when I might happen to see mine come, and the response I got was that my original order had sort of gone into limbo due to an error kicked up by DHL! They were nice enough not to make me join the end of the queue though, and immediately shipped one out, and I had it in my hands today, scarcely a week after that interaction!

It really is an amazing little device--I set it up within a few minutes of its arrival and before long was imaging the sun, too! View attachment 66878
Click to expand...
Awesome! Great job James!

I look forward to seeing what you can do with it in regards to DSO's. I have found the images to be pretty noisy.
 
Mike Lewis

Mike Lewis

Staff Member
Jim,

Lovely - really like the result, the sunspots are popping out with very well defined edges and even some sort of detail rotating into or out of view on the lower right limb and upper left limb. Very nice. I imagine this will do nicely on the solar eclipse if it can track well enough to keep it in the frame for the portions of the eclipse you plan to image.

ML
 
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