ZWO Seestar Secret Menu! - Hidden Functionalities

if you own or plan to buy a cwlc star you're going to want to see this I've already tested it for a few weeks and I'll be out with my full review and test results but I just can't keep this one to myself apparently there's a whole hidden secret menu with a bunch of options uh that's been now found and you can access it on your Android or on your iPhone and you can have access to all these extra features that are just not advertised and you you don't know that you can do them now I don't know if now that I put this video out they're going to or maybe remove this so in that case maybe don't update the software yet if you want to try it but it's definitely interesting and it gives you a kind of idea of what direction uh CW is going to go in in the development of this product so let's take a look at this so I have my sear here I'm going to turn it on and all we got to do is connect to it from the phone connect I will connect to it and this is where the phone part starts when I go into my sear just by clicking on the picture itself or the name of your sea star this is all these basic options that you need but this is where the fun part comes in you just take a look at the top part here where it says my SE star and you start tapping it after like a couple four or five times you start seeing the experimental feature menu appear out of nowhere and there you can have access to all these extra features you can set up the preview exposure if in your field of view there's not many Bright Stars uh that should help enhance exposure you can actually change the exposure time of the individual frames of the seaster which is something that we thought I thought they might eventually enable but like this we can access it right away um with the focal length that it has it is very likely that we're not going to have any issues with star trailing at 20 or 30 seconds because anyway it is tracking the sky so the only concern is the rotation of the field and I I don't believe that would be an issue U at 30 seconds then we can have the option of saving all frames we can have the showing of the stack number so this is enabled by default we can turn that off we can show the track speed and the coolest thing is that we can enable dithering if you don't know what that is what it does is between each X number of frames it will move the sensor ever so slightly so that if you have um differences in the readout noise and levels of your between your pixels these will eventually cancel each other out so you can enable dithering you can say what the distance is I think that 50 is insane I think I would set it to something like one if um I think 50 seems to be the minimum I don't know what the unit is but I suppose it would be pixels um I believe that's a lot because we're going to be taking 10 20 second exposure so if if you move it by 100 pixels each time unless it moves back and forth it would be a lot but anyway I will put it back to the default of and then you can have an interval um I think five when you're taking these short exposures is probably little I will set it to 10 then we have three-point calibration I believe that must be similar to a three star calibration on uh a a regular Mount and we can apply the calibrated value what I expect is that the tracking of the image will be more accurate compared to just doing the the plate solve because um this way the mount can have an actual model of the sky then we have horizontal correction I do not know what that is but I fully plan to enable that um I wonder if this would work in case you don't have your Mount uh your SE star perfectly horizontal I will be abling enabling that oh it seems like you can have one or the other I'm going to go with the apply calibrated value for the three-point calibration then you can have a look at the battery temperature and the sensor temperature and finally you have this Chinese writing that um I looked it up with Google translate and it just translates to uh grid lines so I think it would just show you the where you are in the celestal hemisphere that you're in I'm going to enable that as well so I'm going to go outside I'm going to place the sear outside and I'm going to try it all out and already see what the Chinese scripture meaning GD lines meant it just shows you these um lines which is very confusing because these are not coordinates these are literally just grid lines um so this probably just helps you maybe censor something something in the field of view I think I'm going to turn this off because it's really annoying so I tried doing the three-point calibration um it took it just said um wait for a minute until it finishes running U it did move uh around the sky a little bit but it was just a tiny bit like a couple of degrees um definitely not all around the sky like I would have expected it to I suspect it's going to help it track more accurately yeah so this uh correction thing doesn't seem to be working really well for me because all it does is make everything streaky it's like it's not tracking properly um and then it just discards all the pictures cuz you can't stack them I will turn it off now and I'll try some of the other features so the most intriguing new feature has to be being able to set the exposure time so I did this experiment here where at the top there's 15 minutes of the Andromeda galaxy in 10-second shots and the bottom is 15 minutes and 30 second shots and as you see them blink you can see that the stars as expected are a little bit more contained in the shorter exposures and here are the same two pictures I've just done a really quick processing on them in the exact same way um after deconvolution the stars are not an issue so if somebody's actually willing to go the way of processing the images in post I definitely recommend doing the 30 second route cuz you'll just have a third as many files let me know if you end up trying out any of these new features and if you find any of them useful in any way

Channel: The Space Koala

Views: 7,031

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Id: Zh0XKXvmT-g

Length: 5min 58sec (358 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023