ZWO SEESTAR | Tips, Tricks, and Ultimate Tutorial!

hello everyone and welcome to the channel for another sear s50 video now in this video we're going to be going over some stuff that maybe you already know and also stuff some stuff that you might not already know and so you're going to want to make sure you stay tuned for all of it now the things that we're going to be going over are not not limited to these things but it's going to include solar Imaging lunar Imaging planetary Imaging nebula Imaging and Galaxy Imaging uh and also some scenery and we're also going to go over the initial setup of the C stars50 as well for anyone who doesn't know how to do it um you know the whole leveling process even even focusing you know we're going to explain how to do the manual focusing how to save the individual uh fits files for later postprocessing and we're just going to go over everything that I can think of so make sure you stay tuned for the rest of the video but obviously first things first what we're going to go over is the initial setup of SE Stars 50 so let's get [Music] started all right so as I said before the first things first that we're going to do is the actual setup of the C stars50 including you know the whole leviz the focusing everything for sear uh but obviously first things first we're going to do is we're going to have our sea Star the easiest way honestly to screw this on is to just take it make sure you can actually see the hole instead of just trying to guess where it is and start rotating it on afterwards you can go ahead and just rotate it normally as generally people would uh but honestly if you're trying to find the hole just blindly it can make things slightly more difficult now if you're planning on setting your C stars50 up for nighttime after photography I would definitely recommend that you point your SE star basically in the direction uh of where that object is going to be rising um and we're going to go over some details later on about you know the whole field rotation and everything uh but obviously you want to make sure your initial setup is towards where uh the object is rising also if you plan on using your sear for an extended period of time make sure you have a type-c charger available that you can just go ahead and plug in to the back of your sear and also make sure it doesn't get in the way or it's it's not too short that it'll basically stop the SE star from being able to do the tracking properly now for this next thing that we do is we turn the power button on and you have to hold it for about 3 seconds and after those 3 seconds you'll hear a beep um and you wait a little bit longer and it will say powering on ready to connect so let's wait for that powering on ready to connect okay it is powering on and ready to connect obviously it just takes probably about 10 seconds to actually get it set up and after it is set up we can go to our sear app now you'll hear it the motor is kind of grinding in there uh and once the motors are done that's when you know it's actually ready to connect properly so go ahead and open your sear app now once you're inside of the sear app what you're going to do is you're going to press connect here uh it's going to say connect to your sear you go ahead and connect to that Wi-Fi and then afterwards you can actually connect to your own home Wi-Fi uh so go ahead and join the sear Wi-Fi first allow that to connect it will only just take a few seconds all right it is now connected to my Sears 50 now what do we actually do to connect to our home Wi-Fi for that we go to our settings here click on Wi-Fi and turn station mode on now you see that here it says station mode turn that on it'll search for available networks and that will only just take a minute you can actually go back if you have to refresh it click on your Wi-Fi as you can see I have it there there's a whole lot of different Wi-Fi not all of these are mine obviously just one so we're just going to click on that one and it'll just take a moment to connect there generally uh I've already connected to this so I do have the password Sav so it might not ask me for the password uh as you can see it does didn't not ask me for the password but generally if you're initially setting up your C Stars 50 and you need to uh sorry and you need to set it up uh make sure you uh click on your Wi-Fi and type in the password for it to be able to register correctly now afterwards you go ahead and go back and you will be connected to home Wi-Fi so you don't actually have to be close to your SE Stars 50 for it to work you can be inside of your house be a little bit outside of your house just as long as you're in the uh proximity of your household Wi-Fi it will work fine now next thing that we need to do for your sear 50 uh is do your leveling process so you'll see where it says uh device not level go adjust and you click on that they'll say please level your sear very polite you know it's very sweet of it to say that uh then you go ahead and start leveling it what you do here is you take these different things on on the sear tripod as you can see here uh you can loosen them or you can tighten them and once you have it in the correct position that's when you can go ahead and do the tightening now honestly for me what I like to do for my SE stars50 is I like to make sure that the tripod has one leg directly in the back in the middle and honestly makes things a lot easier for me in regards to the actual setting it up um instead of having it you know at a certain angle that's uh slightly difficult to obtain with the c star leveling on the app uh so like like I said L I always like to do and honestly what I feel I would recommend for others to do in regards to leveling this only takes me about 30 seconds to get it actually leveled now uh since I put this tripod like in the back directly in the back in the center as you can see uh so I'm going to go ahead and level it and we will continue from there now for this just another example what I recommend is that you level the sides you know obviously the front ones first make sure that's even so that the bubble as you can see is kind of just on top and on the bottom of each other afterwards you can go ahead and just take the one in the back this is why it's so easy take take the one in the back and you can move it up and down accordingly to however you need obviously it doesn't have to reach 0.0 um that is desirable for anybody who you know wants to obtain 0.0 but uh as long as the circle is actually green and I definitely recommend you don't allow it to be over 0.3 that will end up me messing up the track uh tracking if you're trying to do solar Imaging lunar Imaging or as photography Imaging that that will mess it up so make sure it's either 0.12 or even better 0.0 obviously that's going to can take a little bit longer um but some people can manage it other people can't uh personally I'm fine with 0.1 and0 2 obviously this only took just a few seconds as you can see so it's very easy to do uh very quick as well so once that's done uh once you're done leveling your C Stars 50 go ahead and press finish adjusting and your leveling process will be complete now uh the next thing that we could do is check out scenery mode and for that let go to Scenery and we can actually go ahead and move around the sea star go ahead and open it up just like this honestly I think it's so cool just watching the way it moves and hearing the motors work all right once you have your SE star pointing at an object all you have to do it's extremely easy very fast go ahead and press the autofocus button and it will make sure it gets a perfect focus in a very clear image which you will see here on the screen just give me one minut autofocus completed all right autofocus is completed it was very quick and very efficient as well as you can see everything is very sharp and very neat it's very good for such a cheap telescope honestly $500 is the absolute steal for something like this uh it's honestly very very close in comparison with v as forp but honestly I have to lean towards a SE star definitely because of the price as well uh definitely makes up for it uh so go ahead and if you want to go ahead and focus on another object go ahead and move your SE star with the joysticks obviously as you can see needs to be Focus again so if you need to focus again press the autofocus button and maybe you don't want to see all these buttons here on the screen so all you have to do is press this little button here at the top and it gets rid of all the buttons uh that basically just gets rid of all the uh UI um and makes it all cleaned up makes it look a lot neater so uh I believe this object might be too close to actually focus on again that was an object a bit too close I'd probably say that the distance um for the actual autofocus to work for C Stars 50 it is a pretty high magnification so make sure you don't have an object uh within 50 ft of range otherwise it won't be able to autofocus uh correctly so far as what I've noticed um but as you can see the autofocus is extremely sharp and very precise and you can get very nice photography uh just with this and I'm just going to give you an example let's go ahead and zoom in on an animal right now that I actually see walking by all right it wasn't actually walking by but this object is actually about I'd say 300 feet away from where I am now so let's go ahead and give a a brief example of the how precise the autofocus is and how good of a quality these Optics are so go and check that out here press the autofocus button and you should be able to tell pretty quick what it actually isoc again this object is actually about 300 ft away and you can see everything very clearly um these are some beautiful birds right here these are some my chickens as you can see um but obviously the autofocus works great you don't really generally have any issues with it I've never had any issues with the autofocus for the C Stars 50 and the quality of the Optics are absolutely incredible now what's the next thing that we're going to check out obviously uh one thing as you can see the Sun is going down so I can't really do any solar yet the Moon is over there it's not quite above the Horizon quite yet but one thing that is going to be showing up pretty soon is Jupiter now with Jupiter you're not going to want to wait till actually Nightfall if you're going to do planetary astrophotography with C Stars 50 do not wait for Nightfall your image will end up being Overexposed and you won't see any detail on the planet so what we're going to do is we're actually going to wait for Twilight just when there's a little bit of daylight left um but just enough for us to be able to see some detail on the planet Jupiter let's go ahead and check that out in just a few minutes all right so it is now time for some planetary with SE star s50 now there's actually a huge update that just came out uh in regards to planetary before it was sort of a complicated process in order to actually do uh any planetary Imaging on Jupiter or Saturn uh before you would have to wait until dawn uh if you do not wait until dawn the Jupiter would end up being way Overexposed but sear actually now has a way to basically fight against that you no longer have to go through any weird process uh finding the moon first now it's extremely simple sea star has drastically improved uh in regards to planetary and it has made things so much easier now and I'm really excited to show you guys how it works so first thing you do is you go to planetary uh as you can see we have a manual focus on so you don't because autofocus generally doesn't work as good uh with playing AR as it does um on things like the moon in scenery Mo mode and stars we now have the manual focus here which makes things so much easier for us uh but it also gives us three different options we have time lapse photo and video photo is great if you just want to take one single exposure of a planet video is best if you want to do further post-processing on computer in order to get the most amount of detail possible uh with your SE star on these planets so uh we're going to go through a little example with for that real quick we open up the skyus as you can see it's taking a moment to I guess download basically updates give that one second all right that is now done downloading so let's go ahead and find Jupiter should be pretty easy to find just go ahead hit the search button here and type it in there it is it's actually already right there in the center so let's go ahead and do gazing uh and it will automatically open up as always and find the object by itself so let's give it just a moment object is centered all right as you just heard object is centered so we should see Jupiter right here and there it is looking awesome uh so there's actually this button up here that allows it to uh keep it in the center once it's being tracked correctly that way it won't move out of the frame due to perhaps your sea star not being leveled it will automatically reenter uh if it ever goes somewhat you know off center uh so what we do here is in order to be able to see some detail on this planet we go to the exposure settings we turn that way down and as you can see we now have Jupiter right there of course it looks somewhat like a blob so what we can do now is just go do some editing uh of the focus here let's go ahead and play around with these numbers until it looks perfectly clear all right so that looks pretty clear to me you can actually see some of the banding here let's go ahead and turn up the exposure just a little bit as you can see that's too much SL let's lower it down as you the the exposure is pretty sensitive so you kind of just have to play around with it until you're happy with how it looks so let's go ahead and zoom back out now in order to actually get some good Imaging uh with sear in regards to planetary you have to make sure you have raw video on and you allow the video to record for about 10 minutes now why is this important the reason for that is that when you take it into the computer it's going to separate each different frame of this Avi video and stack it together in order to get a higher resolution image uh which is going to allow you to see a lot more detail on the planet than you see now so we're going to allow this to run for about 10 minutes and then maybe we can go ahead and check out Saturn as you just saw d uh sear did a pretty decent job in trying to keep the planet Jupiter uh directly in the center of the screen and if you look here at the video you can see very clearly the stripes of the Bands here um hopefully we were able to get it uh with the red spot honestly I wasn't really checking uh I didn't check on starian to see if the Red Spot would be visible right now but I'm kind of hoping it was uh maybe we'll be able to see that again later on in post processing which you'll see uh closer towards the end of the video um if you're interested in seeing that uh let's go ahead and find Jupiter now uh sorry not Jupiter Saturn let's go to search go to Saturn there we go and hit gazing it will automatically go to our beautiful planet Saturn object is centered all right as you can see it successfully found the planet Saturn let's check the exposure real quick make sure we have it there set it back to automatic it's taking a minute to load per my connection is quite slow and there is Saturn looking awesome right there so let's go ahead and do the enable Target correction to make sure we keep that right in the center as you can saw saw as well it did a pretty good job in regards to keeping Jupiter right in the center there's a bit of move a bit of vibration due to the sear actually moving but it's very handy that it was able to stay so accurate on keeping that centered as we need it to be so let's go ahead and lower down this exposure again obviously not as much all right that looks like the perfect amount of exposure possible for Saturn so now let's allow this to run for another 7 to 10 minutes and we'll take get inside again later on in the video for postprocess all right so that should be enough exposure time on our beautiful planet Saturn now honestly I was sitting here on my roof just looking up at the ceiling sorry at the stars and I saw some strange white light moving across the sky and it ended up burning up in the atmosphere I'm kind of curious about what it was if anybody would know it's 7:23 p.m. um Monday December 4th if someone could look that up uh it's pretty interesting anyways that's pretty much all there is to do in regards to planetary obviously you can just take photos you know you can do the whole time lapse function uh but it's honestly best if you were to uh record it in an Avi video and taking it for post processing later like we're going to do um so probably the next thing that we're going to cover is actually the lunar function so uh let's go ahead and stay tuned for that it's going to happen in just one second all right so it is now time to check out the lunar function of the sear s50 and honestly the way it works is extremely simple so as long as you have your sear 50 leveled the whole go-to process is super easy um you really really don't have to do anything to actually get that set up so all you have to do is you press the lunar button here go to Moon uh sometimes you do have to do the compass calibration so in order to do that just go ahead and hit start calibration unplug your sea store if you have it plugged in and just go ahead and start rotating it around until you see that Circle turn all the way green all right sometimes you might have to go ahead and relevel your SE star uh after you do the compass calibration depending on uh how you end up setting it at the end uh but after that it should automatically start doing the goto once your sear is finished being leveled and uh the compass is done being calibrated it'll only take a minute to find the moon and just go ahead and allow it to do its thing as you can see it has successfully found the moon so all you have to do is press this yes button uh and it will automatically do its best to track the moon now you go ahead and do your autofocus here autofocusing because the autofocus for the Moon is not going to be the same thing uh autofocus for the stars or autofocus on a planet or on the sun it's always going to be different now you can take the pictures or if you have a perhaps maybe a lunar eclipse you can use the time LAX function uh but if you want to get the most detail out of your lunar image make sure that you switch to the video mode turn Raw on and then you go ahead and allow it to record for the 10 minutes so we're going to allow it to record for the 10 minutes and we'll take the video later inside side uh to my laptop to postprocess this video um of course we're just going to let this record and we'll go ahead and switch to the astronomy mode so uh let's let this happen and then let's take a look at the next part of the video all right so it is now time to cover the astronomy mode of the sear s50 now first things first one thing I do want to cover is the do heater so we go here uh to the s50 um by the way I know a lot of people have mentioned to me the experimental features uh that has been taken off with a new update as you can see you know you press the MyCar button over and over and over again that was supposed to bring up a button that says experimental features however that is no longer there uh with the new update so if you still want to see it make sure that you don't uh update yet but honestly it is best for the ZW privacy that you that you do update you know that you don't have the experimental features they're going to be releasing these features in the future anyways um honestly it's basically just supposed to test out their new PR mode as far as I'm aware and with that Pro mode one thing that they are in fact trying to include uh is the Mosaic mode and that was not in this experimental features by the way um the thing that was in the experimental features was the three-point calibration uh the the longer exposure times that was another thing that was pretty convenient honestly uh but those are things that we're going to be seeing later in the future so obviously sear S5 zwo has put a you know basically a stop to that because that type of thing is not supposed to be available yet um but it is nice to know that they do have that type of feature uh planned for the future of the sear s50 um but they're just trying to test it within certain developers uh so that uh when they actually release it it will work perfectly and properly just like they wanted to honestly it's best for uh the customer themselves so uh anyways about the anti-d heater if you have the anti-do heater off at the time of uh beginning to take your astrography images and and then you go on to turn it on later uh because perhaps it starts cooling down at night you know you start getting fog on your lens it can end up getting hot pixels in your astrophotography images which is something that you definitely do not want um especially if you don't want to do later postprocessing maybe if you just want to uh save the jpeg file U just to look at your on on your phone just say hey I took this picture if you turn this anti-do heater on Midway that could end up bringing in hot pixels because uh when you're dark files are taken and it's taken at a certain sensor temperature if you go on to turn the anti-d heater on afterwards that temperature of the sensor will eventually change meaning that your dark files will no longer be properly calibrated uh to the temperature of the sensor uh causing the hot pixels later on so make sure you have this on for about 15 minutes and then you can go ahead and get started now another thing that you can look into is the advanced features obviously you want to have save each frame and enhancing if you plan on uh doing postprocessing later on um on seal or pixon site or whatever program it is that you use also make sure that you have plenty of storage space because if you plan on getting a whole lot of exposure time you're going to need that storage now here we are in the sky Atlas here's another thing that we need to pay attention to you go to the search you click on tonight's best you scroll down and you look at the altitude of these objects now you don't want to allow the sea star to pass about 65° in the night sky um um while you're trying to get more exposure time the reason for this is because the closer that you get to the Zenith or the highest point in the sky the more field rotation you're going to see in your astrophotography image so I definitely recommend um if you plan on getting a very high extended amount of exposure time make sure you stop at around 65° and then you can start it again after it lowers to 65° below again uh that would greatly reduce the amount of field rotation that you have in your final image and allow you the SE stars50 to actually track much much better uh than it would if you allow it to reach that zeni honestly once it reaches 85 Degrees the tracking is no longer accurate so make sure you stop it around 65° to get the best image possible now another thing that we can take a look at in the menu here is they actually have the solar now listed as an object they have planets and they also have comets definitely with comets I recommend that you don't get too much exposure time uh the reason for that is because you will end up seeing star Trails if you're just trying to specifically uh track the the comet itself as the comet is moving it is not staying put in one spot of the night sky no this comet is continuously moving kind of like planets uh so make sure that you have um shorter exposure times on the comments unless you have some crazy editing software uh some process that honestly I'm not aware of yet uh so if you do have that process you know for processing comments with a really long exposure time please let me know i' definitely be intrigued now if you go to the Galaxy they have a lot of different options here uh if you look at the little icon you uh yeah the little picture you don't see any kind of Icon there in the corner if you go to nebulus here you do begin to see these little green icons now this icon means that the light pollution filter is going to be on and the importance of this light pollution filter uh it is a Duo band filter meaning that it mainly filters in the hydrogen data and the oxygen data and cuts out everything else so if you're planning on doing uh asro photography on a reflection nebula kind of like the pleades cluster or uh other Galactic nebula or dark nebula it would why be wise not to use the light pollution filter uh and the reason for that is because it's going to cut out most of the light from that reflection nebula or that dark nebula or whatever it is that you're trying to take a picture of it's best if you only use that light pollution filter on uh when you have when you're trying to take a picture of hydrogen Rich uh nebulas or oxygen rich nebulas just to give an example of some astrophotography let's go ahead and take a look at the pades cluster here first we go to the uh let's see here tonight's best it should be right on here and there it is you see it here the Maya nebula that's located within the ples cluster go ahead and hit gazing and it will automatically go to that object object is centered all right as you heard object is now centered so uh you can see this little orange icon meaning that we are doing stargazing at the moment let's click on that and here is a ples cluster now here's a light pollution filter uh you can actually hear it turn on and off which is actually pretty cool hearing the machine work um but first things first what you're always going to want to do whenever you do your as photography is do an autofocus autoc if you don't do an autofocus your stars are going to end up looking pretty blurred um and the great thing about the Sears 50 is that the autofocus is extremely accurate uh in regards to stars and also uh scenery mode and also lunar mode and and solar mode as well it's extremely accurate in pretty much all aspects um except for uh planetary does need a little bit more tweaking with that as far as what I've noticed um of course if your autofocus isn't absolutely perfect as you would want it to be uh for your Astro Imaging you can always use the manual focus uh which is an extremely handy tool that sear has provided for us autofocus completed all right as you heard autofocus is completed uh so go ahead and check you can zoom in here on a star and if you're not happy with it you can go ahead and press these up and down buttons to get the maximum level of clarity possible there we go it's pretty clear now another thing you can do is you can adjust the amount of exposure that you have uh lower it down to even less and also this little Mark button is only available once you start the shooting process so uh just an example you're going to see it take the dark frames here uh it says preparing for image enhancing improving image quality quity takes about 1 minute now when it's talking about the improving improving the image quality it's just talking about taking the dark files uh in order to stack it in with your light files to reduce noise uh and basically just increase the amount of uh visibility you have uh without any uh hot pixels getting in your way so let's allow this to finish it should only just take about a minute start enhancing image all right it is now starting to stack the images uh as you can see it's taking 10-second exposures um and after the first 10 second exposure is complete you will be able to use the mark button uh to basically register what it's looking at here all right the first 20 seconds have now been stacked in so we can press this Mark button it will mark it in just a second and there we go it is now marked as the Maya nebula NGC 1432 of course if you have that on the entire time and allow the sear to stop taking the image uh with that Mark on it will save your J file with that Mark on it so if you do not want to have that on your final image make sure you turn that off before all right so that pretty much covers everything that there is to know um about the astronomical function uh of the sear s50 of course there's a lot more to be covered in regards to post-processing later on uh but that's pretty much all we have uh in regards to the settings on the Sears 54 the astronomy function of course that's until Mosaic mode comes into uh comes into play which I'm extremely excited about that just for you all to know just a quick crash course on that Mosaic mode is basically just taking different pictures and putting them together to get something like this which is a small field of view and making it one larger image uh basically expanding the field of view that that you can have um in your image so uh we're going to allow this to run for a while and we'll take it in later on for postprocessing uh if you want to see that make sure you stay tuned for the rest of the video now there's only one thing left to cover with your C Stars 50 that being the solar mode so again this is extremely easy mode to use just like the lunar mode and the first thing you have to do is take out your solar filter before you do anything at all obviously you want to make sure your sear 50 is leveled Compass is calibrated then you go ahead and take out your solar filter it's extremely high quality they did an incredible job with this filter as always and you just go ahead and clip it into the top here just like that then you go over here to your sear app you click on solar and click installed and go to now as you can see it says I do need to calibrate the compass so give me one minute moment to do that so as you just saw another really easy way of doing the calibration for the compass is simply just rotating the C Stars 50 on the head so you don't have to level it again afterwards as you can see it is still Level so after you do that it will automatically go to and find the Sun and we'll just give it a moment to do that now sometimes it has a hard time actually finding the Sun so here's a little trick on how to actually do that so sometimes after it moves a certain amount it's going to say the device is not level that's not true the device is level after you leveled it the first time just go ahead and go back to its original starting position once you're there go back to solar mode skip go to and observe and if you take your hand and put it behind the sear s50 you can move it until you see a little white slit basically the sunlight shining through the slit between the actual camera body and the lens uh sorry the lens and the body of the sea star itself you'll see a line going through there that means that your sea star is pretty much aligned uh with sun and you can work with that as you just saw just using that method I found the sun and it was extremely easy to do now as you can see it is perfectly Cent centered we press this button here uh meaning that is in the center of the screen we use the auto reenter button and we make sure we do our autofocus on the sun autofocus completed there you can go there you go you can see the beautiful sun spots on the sun it's pretty cool to watch this um unfortunately as you can tell I do have some branches in the way uh of my solar uh image but we can go ahead and take pictures uh sometimes if there's a solar eclipse you can use a time lapse function function they have the different intervals so it will take a frame each uh one of these seconds there's 1 second 2 5 uh 10 20 30 and 60 uh that's perfect for if you want to do a solar eclipse uh time lapse and then there's a video mode again if you plan on doing post- processing later on make sure you switch it to raw and start recording now I obviously can't let it record a very long time because as you can see uh Shadow is now getting in the way uh because of a tree that's extremely nearby not to mention you can already see a tree right here but and birds just flew in front of the image but you know it is what it is honestly you can just take one single exposure of the Sun and be happy with it cuz it's extremely high Optics and the solar filter is excellent quality um unfortunately I don't have a lot of storage space left in my SE store so again I can't record a long video for post-processing but I'll definitely show you another image that I took uh with SE Stars 50 using the post-processing method that we're actually going to use for the moon as well um so if you want to know how to do the post processing for the sun just make sure you do the same thing as I'm going to do for the moon now there's one final thing actually that we do have to cover about SE start and that is just the shutdown process again it's extremely easy you exit out of whatever you're doing you go to your C Stars 50 in the settings and you slide to shut down and this will automatically close your telescope but make sure that before you do that you take off your solar filter so that it doesn't get stuck in there but again it'll only take just a second to shut down and once it's done you can pack it up inside of the sear case and go inside all right so here we are on PC just a heads up um if you're going to transfer your files from your cs50 to your laptop you have to make sure that your Sears 50 is turned on uh while you're trying to do the transfer otherwise it will not actually be able to uh show you any of the files so uh once you actually have it plugged in and everything you can just go ahead and check that out here uh you'll see once it's plugged in it will open up the folder you can see both the dark library and the my Works uh but what we're going to cover now is planetary solar uh lunar and then I actually managed to get several deep Sky objects stacked uh throughout the period of last night as well and you can see that right here right there that's where you can see it uh basically it's just going to be playing through the whole stacking process if you would like to see that uh while we actually do the pro postprocessing here so first things first obviously we're just going to copy and paste our files onto the PC so this will take take about 10 minutes depending on how many things you actually have um and once that's done we'll get started with the first planetary postprocessing all right so as you can see we have all the files here now uh there's let's see which one this one is we have Jupiter Saturn the moon M45 NGC 293 and the Flaming star nebula all here on the computer and I'm very excited to to process these especially the planetary uh since this is honestly my first time actually doing the planet mode on T Stars 50 now the planetary and lunar Imaging is extremely easy and you can do the same thing for solar as well if you have solar video open up ASI Studio you can find that on the zwo website make sure that you install uh the planetary video stacking the ASI uh let's see the ASI video stack and that's the easiest program you can use you don't have to use Auto stacker you don't have to use uh I forgot what the other one is called the pre the planetary Imaging pre-processor you don't have to use any of that it's just this one program that does it all and it's honestly super easy uh so make sure that you check it out it's ASI Studio open up ASI video stack and then just like that all you have to do is take your image file or your video file the Avi hit copy it was captured by a color camera hit okay here you can zoom in to check the the Bayer pattern make sure that's correct make sure you stack pretty much all of the files I'm just going to set it at 95 because there are some that didn't come out perfect and then after that just go ahead and hit the stack button and allow it to do its work now uh while I was doing that one I am also going to stack the uh Saturn video so let me go ahead and open it again I just go ahead and drag this out of my way or not let's go to the desktop and open up Saturn video all right again captured by color camera hit okay and stack as many of these files as possible so again 94 95% should be fine hit stack and allow that to finish all right so as you can see Saturn is the first one that finished stacking and it took about 6 minutes and 30 seconds Jupiter is still running but let's take a look at what we got here for the Saturn image from sear how if you can zoom in here it's not like super impressive of course you can't really expect a whole whole lot of course you can see some of the moons here if you take a look um you have to keep in mind this telescope does not exactly have the focal length for planetary photography but the fact that we're able to actually see it um honestly I find pretty cool uh hopefully you can agree with me when I say that uh the Saturn image actually came out pretty decent given the fact that again it's an extremely low focal length but we were still able to get a nice view of the planet Saturn um honestly you can guys just go ahead and let me know what you guys think in the comments uh I'm pretty happy with how it is you know honestly for the fact that it was again taken with an extremely low focal length telescope uh I do think it looks pretty neat especially since you know it it looks pretty tiny in the center of the screen here but honestly I'm more looking forward to see what we can do uh with the planet Jupiter of course these different planets would change you know circumstances are going to change as they get closer and as they get further away uh from the earth maybe we can try these different planets when they're at opposition uh it's more than likely when we're going to see the best amount of detail on these planets especially with a sea star s50 um but the there's these different controls here uh as well there's you can sharpen up your image even more perhaps if you want to obviously that doesn't look good for the Saturn planet uh you can turn into brightness up and down honestly the controls on here are extremely easy to use and uh very beginner friendly as well so make sure that you Che out this this program again I'm extremely excited to see what we can get with Jupiter so let's allow that to finish up real quick all right stacking is complete as you saw it took uh 12 minutes and 59 seconds and I'm really hoping we can get a good image of Jupiter as you saw um it took let me see how many frames it took 5,267 frames at 10.7 GB another reason I again will repeat if you're going to do planetary Imaging with your sea star make sure you have plenty of storage space that you don't run out that would be an absolute disaster but okay let's check out our image here zoom in and you can very very clearly see the bands of Jupiter and honestly one two three four wait is it and five different moons honestly that's very impressive for the sea stars 50 uh I'm very impressed honestly we can turn out the sharpness level up um just a bit here to try to get a little bit more detail um maybe that is the red spot that we're able to get there it's honestly quite difficult to tell you can turn up saturation some as well all right obviously you don't want to oversaturate it's looking a little bit green um unfortunately perhaps the beay pattern was not uh done correctly so uh turn down the saturation a little bit more and we can ttin that uh later on just the normal pictures um oh actually we have this here so is RGB um of course I'm not sure yeah no I'm afraid I can't really do anything with that I would have to do that um kind of processing in programs like Cal uh which I'm not really familiar with in regards to planetaria I'm more familiar with that with galaxies and nebula and stuff like that uh but we can bring up the noise reductions a bit uh to get rid of the pixels that we have there uh turn down the saturation a little bit bring up this contrast just the Tad uh to get rid of that ring that we have around here and then Zoom back out and then to save your image just go ahead and uh let me Zoom all the way out there we go hit the save button and you will be able to find that in the working directory here so go ahead and close out of that hit yes you can close out of all of this as well it's going to be in the ASI video stack folder so if you ever need to find it that's where it is honestly I'm pretty Blown Away with what C star was able to do uh with Jupiter personally I wasn't expecting it uh definitely wasn't expecting really to see any kind of anything with Saturn but here we are able to see the rings of course it's not like we're going to be using some sort of 6in duoni and Telescope no it it's completely different it's very short focal length but we're still able to see these and we're even able to see some detail on the planet of Jupiter including the different moons so honestly I'm blown away I think that's pretty cool now the next thing that we can check out as well is the lunar processing again that's going to be with ASI studio so go ahead and open up ASI video stack and we will drag and drop the lunar video into here uh yes it was captured by a color camera obviously I'm not 100% sure what the Bayer pattern is here uh but we're just going to leave it uh just like that hit okay and there we go we have the moon right there the coloration seems normal so what we do here is we switch it to Moon and Sun surface and we bump up the stack percentage obviously we want to select the main area where it's going to be uh stacked you can go ahead and and drop this box leave it there and once you're satisfied you can go ahead and hit the stack Button as you can see it was recorded in 1,80 by 1920 uh resolution and we got 60 6,390 frames and somehow this one was still 12.34 GB so again if you're going to do lunar planetary solar Imaging make sure you have plenty of storage space left on your PC and on your sear so let's allow this to stack okay after 9 minutes and 39 seconds it is now done the lunar image is now complete as you can see everything is looking very sharp and very neat obviously again this is one of the very many reasons it's important that you stack your lunar imagees so you can get the most Clarity possible now several things you can do obviously bring up saturation uh again we have that kind of green tint those people who are familiar with programs like Adobe Photoshop um pixon site would be able to bring out different color ation it's kind of like what we what they have in what's known as a mineral moon it's another thing that can be brought out but you can kind of play around with the sharpness level here obviously you don't want to over sharpen it because it would make it look somewhat bad uh so you can bring up the noise reductions a bit lower down the sharpness level just like that and bring up the brightness too if you want um but honestly I'm pretty happy with how this Moon image itself looks so I'm just going to save that but that was just a quick run through on how to actually use the program obviously you can play around with it a little bit more do some more editing later on and now it's time to check out uh what we can do with actual asop photography uh so here we have obviously as you saw the first thing that we were taking an image of was M45 so when you use seral with your sear s50 images obviously you want to check your preferences uh make sure that you have in the preferences the Bayer pattern uh to set just give me one minute to load it's going to take just okay there uh bare information for files header available make sure you have that checked if you're not sure what the be Mosaic pattern actually is it is not gbg uh that was for the dwarf 2 that I still have that set as but it'll automatically convert just like that uh for this obviously uh because it has the dark files already built in you're going to want to make sure that you use the script osc pre-processing without darks bias or flats um and you want to set your home directory obviously as the uh file the folder that has the lights uh that you want to use so hit open on that we're going to use the OS preprocessing without dark bias or flats and we're basically just going to run through the same system um in all three of these different objects so the first one the ples cluster all right so stacking for M45 is now complete it only took 2 minutes and 9 seconds and that is while running the stacking for the other two uh deep Sky objects as well uh but let's get started with the processing again it's going to be the same run through through every single one uh so for the first one M45 we click on our result. fit file and as you can see it's pretty small the uh se50 doesn't have a wild wide field of view um so that's kind of the results of it we only have the portrait uh hopefully when we get that Mosaic mod we'll be able to get more of that wider landscape uh style uh so we put it in Auto stretch unlink our image and here is our p8's cluster honestly it looks incredible and I'm always Blown Away by the images that sear s50 is able to take uh but let's get started with it to make it look even better so first things first is our uh background extraction so we go here we hit generate sometimes it is able to do it all correctly sometimes you have to lower the grid tolerance a bit down uh so that it doesn't click on any of the actual neocity of M45 uh once that's done you go ahead and hit compute background once it's computed the background you go ahead and hit apply and it will just take one moment to apply all right now that that is done uh we can go ahead and do our uh remove green noise just go ahead and do that apply again once it's done go and hit close on there go to image processing do your photometric color calibration obviously the great thing about C Stars 50 is that it auto automatically has the coordinates saved uh in here in the image including the fork length pixel size and it will also let you know if there's any kind of filters uh built into that uh so all you have to do here is just hit okay generally it'll work perfectly fine all right as you see it worked perfect you know we had no issues with that and that's generally how it will be all the time uh so now we go ahead and put it into linear mode and we start doing a uh starnet star removal so go to start processing startet star removal allow that to load sometimes it does take a moment all right so now that we have star at here we click on pre-stretch linear image and we leave everything else the same don't recompose the Stars we hit execute here uh and it's just going to take the stars out so we can really work out with the background here so allow star it to run and we'll come back to once that's complete all right as you can see Star it is now done running and here is our pre-stretched image now there's a lot of work that we can do with it and this is honestly extremely basic um run through that we're going to do with seral so first first things first we do our image processing generalized hyperbolic stretch uh let's go ahead and bump this up to 100 hit enter and click on a estimated symmetry point and start dragging it up there we go now another thing that you can do is you can go ahead and select this part here reset that and use the ey drop marker uh just set the Symmetry point and start dragging it up once more there we go we get a lot more of that wispy nebula here uh like that we hit apply now we hit close that that should be okay for now we go to our histogram transformation we don't want to cut out any of the uh nebulosity data so we go ahead and drag this up just to where uh our line begins uh we can kind of drag it up a little bit more to bring that light back in and bring this up to the Tad B more uh to bring more of that darkness in so hit apply here uh we can do that one more time except this time we just go to our linear stretch and bump that up obviously not too much again we don't want to cut into the data that we have here uh so go ahead and bring this up a wee bit hit apply hit close and then we go ahead and do our color saturation we just drag this up a bit obviously you don't want your image to be oversaturated uh so you kind of just play around play around with it until you're satisfied uh so I'm going to hit apply here I think that looks pretty good you you can do a color calibration to kind of neutralize the background use current selection background neutralization uh that gets rid of a little bit of the colorization that we have here in the background uh then we hit save just like that and let's bring the stars back in go to start processing start recomposition and we open up those files here star result and star mask result hit here open and now let's drag these stars back into our image all right there we go I think that's looking pretty good so we hit apply here uh hit close and then we can go ahead and save this as a unique file so there's our plates cluster that was just extremely quick run through just to give everyone a basic idea you know we didn't do any deconvolution any kind of pixel math uh that's that's later steps if you're trying to do more advanced work uh but we're going to close out of that now and let's start working on the Flaming star nebula so again it's going to be the same basic run through so I'm going to kind of try to speed through it a little bit so first things first I open result. fit open we put this in Auto stretch unlink it image processing do our background extraction generate that obviously that's too much generate lower down even more generate that should be good compute background okay hit apply here uh then we go to our uh remove green noise apply close we do our photometric color calibration just like this okay okay obviously it couldn't really do that uh very well because we didn't do the stretch yet honestly that does happen sometimes uh so what we're going to do is just put it into linear and we're going to get rid of these Stars first before we do any kind of keration so we do star processing start at start removal uh pre-stretch linear image and execute as you can see start it was pretty quick to run and here is our flaming star nebula so it's time to really do some work on this we do our generalized hyperbolic stretch kind of Select where the nebula was I put the eye dropper and drag this up obviously that was not uh accurate enough so we can go ahead and select different area reset that select the eye dropper drag it up again that should be good hit apply here hit close and let's bring up the hit histogram a lot as you can see there we go hit apply and we can drag it up even more apply and we can drag it up even more without cutting into the data apply drag this down tiny bit to really bring out that neocity even more apply and then drag it up one more time to bring that black point back there we go apply there hit close and now let's go ahead and do our color calibration just select that uh make sure we neutralize the background here there we go and we go ahead and do our color saturation drag up that amount there obviously we don't want to do it too much because we don't want to discolor a things hit apply here uh let's do another generalized hyperbolic stretch kind of Select this area I do want to bring in a little bit more saturation so what we can do here uh we do our let's see saturation stretch you know set the Symmetry point there and kind of drag it up a bit obviously not too much but that's that's looking pretty good in my opinion so we hit close here uh again once again this extremely quick run through uh we do our star processing star recomposition starish [Music] result and star mask result let's bring the stars back in here obviously we don't want it too much uh but just enough so honestly I think that's looking pretty cool so we save that just like that save as unique file and then we close out of that one and let's start working on a Galaxy image now so go ahead and hit open here and you see 2903 we got about an hour of exposure time on this one so I'm excited to see what we can do with that honestly the the Galaxy looking beautiful right there uh so first things first we do our background extraction generate that uh let's make sure we get all these different highlights as well because none of these are correct there once that's done hit compute background and everything has evened out nicely hit apply here and everything is nice and one color so that's good we hit save here let's get rid of that green noise hit apply here got rid of that greenness there all right let's do our photometric color coloration hopefully it will work for us this time we hit okay okay again it did not work and that's fine so we get metadata from image uh let's type this in maybe maybe the coordinates are not quite correct NGC 293 try that again hit F all right let's try that here and you see 2905 is what it ended up coming up with but no that did not work either so we're just going to have to do it manually again so first things first we switch to linear uh save our image we go to our star processing starnet star removal and get to work on that all right starnet is complete it did not do a very good job uh in regards to the linear stretch but we're going to try to do that ourselves obviously generaliz hyperbolic stretch bump this up to 100 select our symmetry Point start bringing it up obviously I would like to get more of that wispiness here so I'm just going to sel that one portion there uh see reset that reset the eye dropper go back to the original image and start bringing this up obviously we want to bring it up as much as possible uh without kind of blowing out the core here so just bring this up make sure we have a little bit of Shadow protection here not too much obviously uh hit apply let's go to our histogram transformation bump this back down to one and start bringing this Black Point up of course this is a Galaxy you do have to be very delicate with this type of thing honestly hit apply here bring up that Black Point more apply again bring it up more apply again bring it up a bit more and apply now honestly just the way that we did it you can still see the wispy bands here uh that are generally uh honestly left out if you only cut the blacko without doing the rest of the histogram transformation uh but I'm liking how it's looking so let's save that let's go to our color saturation bring that up a bit obviously we don't want to oversaturate it as always hit apply go to your image processing again color saturation drag that up not too much cuz then it's going to look unnatural there we go that's looking pretty good in my opinion so again we save that and let's bring the stars back in all righty there we go so let's bring the Stars up could try to make it blend more into the image make it look a bit more natural and pretty we actually bring up the stretch factor a tiny bit more as well if need be but obviously you don't want to do it too much honestly I'm I'm liking how it's looking I think this looks pretty good so I hit apply here I'm sat satisfied with how my image looks and I'm going to save this as unique file so we're going to go ahead and take a look at the images that we got just now um in the whole processing session all right so here are some of the images that we got tonight obviously let's start with the planet Jupiter now again I'm extremely happy with how this came out I was honestly mindblown that the sear was able to get the banding here and even the Great Red Spot even though it doesn't look that great in this pict picture no pun intended anyways uh I'm still pretty impressed with what cs50 was able to do hopefully you guys were able to get the same type of results as well uh my lunar image honestly I'm I'm pretty Blown Away with what it was able to do as well again the Optics are very sharp everything always comes out looking very clean with sear so it blows me away every time Saturn it's cool that we were able to see the Rings obviously it's not you can't expect uh to get the same results as you would get with like a 6in dobsonian or a very good telescope it's a very short focal length so you couldn't really expect that much but honestly the fact that we're able to see the Rings and everything it's pretty cool flaming star nebula this was just about an hour of exposure time and I think it looks absolutely awesome uh let me know what you guys think in the comments sear is always able to do an incredible job with deep Sky objects now I will mention I do have an affiliate Link in the bottom uh in the description um if you guys do purchase a c star s50 using that link I will get a certain amount of the commission um of course it does not raise the price of anything for the sea stars 50 for you guys to buy it it just helps out the channel a lot uh so if you are going to buy SE stars50 if you could do it that link that would it means a lot um let me know what you guys think in regards to results hopefully the tips and tricks that were uh mentioned throughout the video was able to help you with your uh uses of the C Star s50 as well well um personally SE Stars 50 is a great tool a lot of people say it's a toy I don't agree I think it's an an awesome tool for astrophotography uh for those who are both getting into it and those who are already experienced in astrophotography um so let me know what you guys think in the comments below uh please leave a like And subscribe honestly it does mean a lot uh to see the support from everyone for the channel and makes me want to do more um if you have any ideas for future content as well please make sure you leave that in the comments below thank you everyone for watching this is Scott cester photography have a good night

Channel: ScottCastrophotography

Views: 14,548

Keywords: Seestar, Zwo, Astro, Astronomy, Astrophotography, Tutorial, Review, Product, Tech

Id: -tFjUGTl5YM

Length: 57min 59sec (3479 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2023