Відео

Whilst I think the argument that it removes some of the personal-growth element by "doing it all for you" is an argument (and it is something I sometimes feel myself), I don't think it's a particularly good one. If you boil that argument down, as an example; no-one would be using modern astrophotography digital cameras, or even DSLR cameras. They'd still be struggling using plates. But that technology was superseded by another, then that tech was superseded etc etc.

A very good video about the Seestar. All the relevant arguments for its place in this hobby. The Seestar and the Dwarf are game changers opening up this hobby to more people. When I heard the news about the Seestar I ordered it directly from ZWO, eagerly waiting for the delivery. It did not disappoint. Still as I am very new to this hobby, only a bit over a year as an astrophotographer, I put my effort in buying and trying out both dedicated astro gear and DLSR/Mirrorless cameras. The first sessions were absolutely pathetic 🤣, but now I have got many good sessions during the winter and spring (when the skies are relatively clear, which are rare occasions where I live on the northern hemisphere). Like Nick says in the video, the quality of the stacks from the Seestar are OK, but you can not expect the quality you may achieve from a dedicated asto-rig. But they will set you down 10 times the price of the Seestar. And the results (images) are not 10 times better. And you *will* need to spend hours in front of your PC to get the images you get "live" from the Seestar. Post processing is a difficult skill to master. When I first was seeking advice on the net from sites like Cloudy Nights I got a bit "depressed" as the "hard core" astrophotographers seemed to be more into fiddling with the gear and scaring away newcomers about all the effort "needed" with taking calibration frames. So far I do not "waste" any time on taking calibration shots and feel my processeed images are more than good enough. The only exception is the ASI294MC. For this I take darks and flats for the setup I am using with it. Back to the Seestar. I did try it out when I got it in january, but did not use it more than a few nights as I had more than enough trying to improve my skills with my dedicated rigs. But when I went on holiday to Greece in late may I brought the Seestar with me. (The season where I live is over. Midnight sun/no dark skies from May until mid August 😵). I was mainly interested with capturing the Milky Way which I did, but I let the Seestar run when I was taking picture with my Fujitsu X-H2 paired with Samyang 14mm and Sigma 18-50mm. The stacks I got from the Seestar was very satisfying as the site I shot from was Bortle 2. So, do not listen to the "elitist" among the community regarding Seestar being a "useless toy". That is far from the truth.

I took up astrophotography a few months ago at the age of 70. I put together a nice rig around a Skywatcher 80mm refractor. Then, I had a back injury . I was so disappointed over this disruption to progress in my new hobby. I purchased a Seestar and am very pleased with it. It's just an easier and lighter way for me to get out and capture subs. I still get to enjoy spending time stacking and processing the files. It's a great piece of tech for a very reasonable price.

Your thoughts? Going camping later this month . Thinking of getting it for this reason and others you noted (cloudy night, demanding job, young kid, can't be buggered to set up bigger rigs). Battery life of about 6 hours should suffice for a couple of nights of camping (maybe a couple of hours each night). There is no electricity at the campsite. I have a Star Adventurer GTi and the Star Adventurer 2i but the prospect of packing up DSLR camera, lens/scope, batteries, tripods, polar aligning, etc. puts me off. Will also have about 6 kids around who demand "instant gratification" so the live stacking and relative quick sessions on a target (about 30 mins) can be a boon combined with a 10" tablet. I think I just convinced myself. Guess I'm easy but not cheap. lol. Now onto the fun times of moving funds so the accountant (wife) is not alerted of purchase. :D

Well balanced but the SeeStar is definitely not a toy Nick!

You hit the nail on the head there Nick. It is a great little toy to play with. Not for me - but great video as ever.

Do you find field rotation to be an issue at all?

The Seestar does create FITS files (not just jpegs), which can be post processed to improve quality considerably. If you're just looking at jpeg images you're missing out on what the Seestar can do. The best way to photograph the moon (or the sun) is to take a RAW video and use an app to glean the best frames and create a much sharper detailed image. If harder were better then we'd all be using DOS on our computers, wouldn't we?

I have had my Seestar for a bit less than a year (I think it arrived in November for me) but it has been a nice addition to my collection of telescopes for much the same reason as you. The ease of setup cannot be beat, and while it isn’t as flexible as my “proper” rigs, since you cannot set it to take a certain number of hours on one target and then move on to another, for example, and the lack of an equatorial mount causing significant field rotation for another, it still can produce pretty decent images for the amount of effort you put into it.

I wonder if the CCP is subsidizing this product, seems too cheap. Someone should come out with a strain wave mount with motorized AL/Az controls for polar alignment with built in computer like ASIAir or NINA. Plug your cameras, focuser, EFW dew heater into the mount. Point it north and level. Turn it on and go inside to monitor. Maybe the Celestron Origin is that but at $4k it’s expensive. I think if these become more mainstream people will get bored because there is no challenge and everyone’s photos will look the same. I would expect to see a lot of these for sale on the used market in a couple of years.

Thank you Nick. I hope you and the family are well. I think I will be getting a seestar S50 in the future as. I've dismantled my astrophotography dso rig, because I live in a 1st floor flat and have to take everything down 2 flights of stairs in 2 trips then lump everything back up I the middle of the night twice, dangle an extension lead out of a 1st floor window to power it. Then having to stay outside all the time with it whilst imaging as it's in a communal area, then as you said with the weather we have it never went out for months. So the seestar will definitely for my use of it in the future. Thank you again for your great video clear skies.

Agree with the review, its well balanced and fair. I used the Seestar for the April Solar eclipse with great success. I wish there was a way to use it for Jupiter/Saturn, perhaps a future model will be good for that. I've done more imaging with the Seestar than I ever did with my traditional equipment. When AI allows for an easier image enhancing experience, I'll use that. Cheers.

the seestar replaced every piece of astro kit i once owned, was getting fed up carrying heavy rigs, cables, laptop etc etc..yes its not perfect, but for my needs now its perfect...also have the dwarf 2...wont be upgrading to dwarf 3, not a big enough upgrade in my books..

I completely agree with your points on the SeeStar. The last couple of years in Glasgow the weather has been appalling for this hobby. Getting the HQ5 PRO and all the rest of the gear out of the garage and set up and then clouds roll in, basically put me off this hobby. With the SeeStar I just look out the window and if there 's a break in the clouds I can pop it down in the garden and start imaging. It's got me fired up again with astrophotography so much that I'm looking forward to the season starting again and running both the SeeStar and my bigger mounts again. It's also great at outreach events when my society does public talks. Yes the public like to use mark-1 eyeball to look through our telescopes but they love looking at images appearing on my ipad and realise it's not as intimidating to use as the "real rigs"

Spot on! The satisfaction of doing everything yourself👍. Im a weelchair user due to paralysed legs (MS) and i absolutely love setting up my gear, Ioptron Skyguider pro "Ipolar" with a full spectrum astro modded Canon 77D, and my Canon L lenses. Getting a RedCat 51 this winter. Greetings from Denmark. Clear sky's.

What I personally recommend is getting touched with your local astronomy club and go to public star Partners. This way, you can look through and see many different types of telescopes. And you can figure out which one you like the best for you and what kind of astronomy it is that you want to do..

Thank you for taking the time to help all of us out! This was a VERY informative video, and I'm looking forward to trying it out on my next open cluster photography session. However, I am not getting the same result you are at the 3:23 mark, where you add a new layer on top of the one you just did a curve adjustment on. When I click on new layer, I just get a white empty box above my first levels adjustment layer, but you get the background image. Can you please help? You've got a new sub! 🙂

Great beginner video!

I think you should judge focus on the stars in the center of the image as opposed to the edge. Egg shaped stars at the edge is probably due to field curvature, and no adjustment to shutter speed will change the field curvature. Looking at the stars in the center of the image will more accurately judge your shutter speed. If they are elongated in the center due it'll be due to inaccurate polar alignment and a long shutter speed.

The new DSS update has made it impossible to stack DSLR images.

Not islam:😮😮🤩 Islam:🤲🏼☠️

Completely worthless video this literally taught me nothing at all

seems starnet is no longer avilable

Hi I'm using the 45 day trial but don't have starnet, is it an addon? or not available with the trial?

Well done Nick! Great to see you back creating fantastic content!

It's a fun, light, and usable scope. Good review. Used it for many deep sky photos.

When I created a new layer, which is it blank? What's the keyboard shortcut for creating a new layer like yours? What is that thing called?

ink can i dm u on your twitter account just want to go thru my setup

Don't feel too badly, Nick. Where I live in Texas we have not had a clear night in many weeks. I'm thinking of taking up cloud photography and ditching astro.

You are back?

Good learning experience! I use the quark and 432mm with a Zenithstar 61. Keep working at it :-)

Any image is a success, as you have photographed something tricky to do. With the bad weather this year in the UK, I have had maybe one or two imaging nights. I have been thinking of taking up solar of lunar imaging, but I only have a Redcat51 so need something a bit longer reach.

Nice to see you back out, Nick! I think your cohost has got a lot of potential too - I think she was explaining something detailed about backfocus.

FYI the Daystar Quark says 5v 2.1 AMP. It's draws about 1-1.5 AMPS so the ASI Air is I think 500 mah... Always power the Quark separately for best results. Also I see some Newton rings when you cut the exposure time down, may need to tilt to reduce or remove. But great job for the first time!!! Only going to get better from here and on!

I've seen comments in both solar chat and CN regarding newtonian rings and the tilter fix. Beautiful rig for testing. Thanks, Nick.

Great Video, nice to see you back too….👍🏻

I enjoyed your video Nick. I’m just getting started in solar too

Well done, Nick! That’s a great image and one you should definitely be proud of!

It's a great image, plus considering you hadn't used most of the kit before I think it's an amazing image Nick. Well done. Good to see you, look after yourself

Simon Tang is the man to follow for sun photography. He does appear in a few of chucks videos. keep at it. Animations of the sun are amazing to watch. I have only managed to do one nice one over a 2 hour period.

Welcome back!!

I kind of abandoned the hobby almost two years ago. I was shooting with a SA 2i and DSLR and while I'm sure my processing could have been better, I just wanted to go all in on astro gear instead of using my DSLR. So I decided to sell my DSLR and pretty much all of my lenses, I only ever bought older style (the Nikon D series) lenses to save money and quite frankly I probably didn't need the new stuff anyway since photography is more about the composition and all that rather than having the fanciest of gear, which is like total opposite of what astrophotography is. Anyway I sold it all and then had 3 months of pretty much no clear skies at all, and that made me put that money earned from the sales into a savings account instead. And there it stayed. I'm looking up all my old Astrophotography channels on UA-cam now to see whats up and saw this video (obviously) and yea I can feel your frustration and disappointment of not enjoying a hobby that used to be fun through the screen. I have two kids, 9 and 4 now, and its a full time job as expected but it's extra tough when your hobbies turn into a burden almost. So now I'm thinking I should just get a DSLR again and get into regular photography because that was at least quite available as a hobby. Just bring the camera with me, if I used it I used it and if I didn't well then I didn't. Like it always was. Anyway I hope you do get going again, I certainly always enjoyed watching your videos believe it or not. I really don't subscribe to channels willy nilly and I guess there's just something about how honest and open your videos are on whatever topic you pick. I very much enjoyed the astroberry / rpi videos you made. I was going that route myself but as you can guess it never happened. I've waffled on long enough. Best wishes for the family, I guess you are a two time father by now so welcome to the club. And looking forward to whatever comes next on this channel. Cheers from Sweden :)

shootorial

Also, i saw a video for another astrophotography youtuber, he loves biscuits, and he met with a guy that works on mounts...um, i think his name was Dave from Dark-something or other. Anyways, Dave said that one mount in particular, i think it was the HEQ5, was more accurate if you ran it on more than the listed power requirements. How would someone go about doing that?

So how do you look at your gear that needs power and figure up how much power you need for at least 12 hours?? I took Electricity/Electronics in middle school, but that was over 30 years ago..more like 35. I dont remember any of the formulas or how to figure up power requirements. Any info from anyone??

Music - ugh

What is the difference between doing Curves adjustment vs sliding the midpoint on the Levels adjustment to the left (towards the data)?

now do the same for 10 second.... 300 sec. and 20 min exposures.. . or more... and see how it affects the need for more frames... and what you get with a LOT of loooooong frames.

Good list of targets. Cygnus with it's neighboring constellations is my favourite area for imaging, most of the area being circumpolar in the UK and high enough for imaging at some point in the night through most months of the year. Not only that, there is a good diversity of targets, including two famous planetary nebula (M27, M57) various emission and dark nebulae, open and globular clusters, there's even a face on spiral galaxy (NGC6946) I hope to image this target this summer along with the Cocoon Nebular (IC5146), but I never get tired of those targets you mentioned either, even an unmodded DSLR with a 135 f2 lens will give reasonable results. I always use Star exterminator these days when processing images taken in this part of the sky so I can process stars and nebula separately, that way you can prevent the stars overwhelming the dso. I'm hoping to be able to do some imaging from a dark sky area this summer too, I will probably go for the Eagle Nebular,

Very helpful.