Hello everyone and welcome to the channel for another Seastar S50 video. Now in this video we're going to be going over some stuff that maybe you already know and also 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 limited to these things but it's going to include solar imaging, lunar imaging, planetary imaging, nebula imaging, and galaxy imaging and also some scenery and we're also going to go over the initial setup. of the c-star s50 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 fits files for later post processing 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 the c-stars 50. so let's get 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-star s50 including you know the whole levelization the focusing everything for c-star but obviously first things first what we're going to do is we're going to have our c-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. But honestly, if you're trying to just find the hole just blindly, it can make things slightly more difficult.
Now, if you're planning on setting your Seastar S50 up for nighttime astrophotography, I would definitely recommend that you point your Seastar basically in the direction where that object's going to be rising. And then we're going to go over some details later on about, you know, the whole field rotation and everything. But obviously, you want to make sure your initial setup is towards where The object is rising also if you plan on using your C star 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 C star 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 C star But being able to do the tracking properly now for this next thing We do is we turn the power button on and you have to hold it for about three seconds and after those three seconds You'll hear a beep and you wait a little bit longer and it will say Powering on ready to connect so let's wait for that.
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 C star app now You'll hear it the motors kind of grinding in there and once the motors are done That's when you know, it's actually ready to connect properly So go ahead and open your C star app now once you're inside of the C star app What you're gonna do is you're gonna press connect here. It's gonna say connect to your C star you go ahead and connect to that Wi-Fi and then afterwards you can actually connect to your own home Wi-Fi. So go ahead and join the Seastar Wi-Fi first, allow that to connect, it will only just take a few seconds.
Alright it is now connected to my Seastar S50. 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. It's a whole lot of different Wi-Fi's.
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, I've already connected to this, so I do have the password saved. So it might not ask me for the password. As you can see, it does not ask me for the password. But generally, if you're initially setting up your Seastars 50 and you need to, sorry, and you need to set it up, make sure you... 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 C-STAR S50 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 proximity of your household Wi-Fi, it will work fine. Now, the next thing that we need to do for your C-STAR S50 is do your leveling process. So you'll see where it says, device not level, go adjust. And you click on that.
your c-star they'll say please level your c-star very polite you know it's very sweet of you 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 c-star 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 c-star s50 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 instead of having it you know at a certain angle that's slightly difficult to obtain with the c star leveling on the app so like like i said what 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 level now since i put this tripod like in the back directly in the back in the center So I'm gonna 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 It's 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 takes just 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 that is desirable for anybody who you know wants to obtain 0.0 but 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 messing up the track tracking if you're trying to do solar imaging lunar imaging or astrophotography imaging that that'll mess it up so make sure it's either 0.1 0.2 or even better 0.0 obviously it's going to take a little bit longer but some people can manage it other people can't personally i'm fine with 0.1 and 0.2 obviously this only took just a few seconds as you can see so it's very easy to do very quick as well so once that's done once you're done leveling your sea stars with you go ahead and press finish adjusting and your leveling process will be complete now the next thing that we could do is check out scenery mode and for that let's go to scenery and we can actually go ahead and move around the sea star go ahead and open it up just like this you Honestly, I think it's so cool just watching the way it moves and hearing the motors work Alright, once you have your Seastar 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 more. Alright 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. It's honestly very close in comparison with the VLN and the Sparrow. But honestly, I have to lean towards the Seastar definitely because of the price as well.
It definitely makes up for it. So go ahead, and if you want to go ahead and focus on another object, go ahead and move your Seastar with the joysticks. Obviously, as you can see, it needs to be focused 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. That basically just gets rid of all the UI. It makes it all cleaned up.
It makes it look a lot neater. So 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 for the actual autofocus to work for a C-STAR is 50. It is a pretty high magnification, so make sure you don't have an object within 50 feet. range otherwise it won't be able to autofocus correctly so far as what I've noticed. But as you can see the autofocus is extremely sharp and very precise and you can get very nice photography 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 brief example of the how precise the autofocus is and how good of a quality these optics are so go ahead and check that out here press the autofocus button and you should be able to tell pretty quick what it actually is again this object is actually about 300 feet away and you can see everything very clearly these are some beautiful birds right here these are some of my chickens as you can see 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 with 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 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 sea 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 but just enough for us to be able to see some detail on the planet Jupiter so let's go ahead and check that out in just a few minutes all right so it is now time for some planetary with sea star s50 now there's actually a huge update that just came out in regards to planetary before it was sort of a complicated process in order to actually do any planetary imaging on Jupiter or Saturn before you would have to wait until dawn If you do not wait until dawn the Jupiter would end up being way overexposed But sea star actually now has a way to basically fight against that you no longer have to go through any weird process Finding the moon first now.
It's extremely simple sea star has drastically improved 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. As you can see we have a manual focus on so you don't because autofocus generally doesn't work as good with Planetary as it does other things like the moon and scenery mode and stars.
We now have the manual focus here which makes things so much easier for us 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 a computer in order to get the most amount of detail possible with your Seastar on these planets.
So we're going to go through a little example for that real quick. We open up Sky Alice. As you can see, it's taking a moment to, I guess, download, basically update.
So give that one second. Alright, that is now done downloading. So let's go ahead and find Jupiter. It should be pretty easy to find.
Just go ahead and 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. 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. Alright, as you just heard, object is centered so we should see Jupiter right here.
And there it is looking awesome. So there's actually this button up here that allows it to 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 re-center if it ever goes somewhat off center. 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 we can go to the exposure settings. is just going to do some editing of the focus here. Let's go ahead and play around with these numbers until it looks perfectly clear. Alright, 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. Let's lower it down.
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 with Seastar 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. This 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 As you just saw, Seastar did a pretty decent job in trying to keep the planet Jupiter directly in the center of the screen. And if you look here at the video, you can see very clearly the stripes, the bands here. Hopefully we were able to get it with the red spot.
Honestly, I wasn't really checking. I didn't check on Stellarium to see if the red spot bot would be visible right now, but I'm kind of hoping it was. Maybe we'll be able to see that again later on in post-processing, which you'll see closer towards the end of the video if you're interested in seeing that.
Let's go ahead and find Jupiter now. 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. Alright, as you can see it successfully found the planet Saturn. Let's check the exposure real quick.
Make sure we actually have it there. Set it back to automatic. It's taking a minute to load. Perhaps 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 saw as well, it did a pretty good job in regards to keeping Jupiter right in the center. There's a bit of movement, a bit of vibration due to the sea star 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. Alright, 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 it inside again later on in the video for post-processing. Alright 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... But no, it's 7.23 p.m.
Monday, December 4th. If someone could look that up. 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. But it's honestly best if you were to record it in an AVI video and take it in for post-processing later like we're going to do. So probably the next thing that we're going to cover is actually the lunar function.
So let's go ahead and stay tuned for that. It's going to happen in just one second. Alright, so it is now time to check out the lunar function of the Seastar S50.
And honestly, the way it works is extremely simple. So, as long as you have your Seastar S50 leveled, the whole go-to process is super easy. You 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. Sometimes you do have to do the compass calibration.
So, in order to do that, just go ahead and hit start calibration. unplug your c-star 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 re-level your c-star after you do the compass calibration depending on how you end up setting it at the end But after that it should automatically start doing the go-to once your Seastar is finished being leveled and 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 and it will automatically do its best to track the moon Now you go ahead and do your autofocus here focusing because the autofocus for the moon is not going to be the same thing as 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 max function 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 you to record for the 10 minutes so we're gonna allow it to record for the 10 minutes and we'll take the video later inside uh to my laptop to post process this video um of course we're just gonna 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 c star s50 now first things first one thing i do want to cover is the dew heater so we go here to the S50. By the way, I know a lot of people have mentioned to me the experimental features.
That has been taken off with a new update. As you can see, you know, you press the MyCStar button over and over and over again. That was supposed to bring up a button that said it's experimental features.
However, that is no longer there with the new update. So if you still want to see it, make sure that you don't update yet. But honestly, it is best for the ZWO's 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 pro mode as far as i'm aware and with that pro mode one thing that they are in fact trying to include uh is a 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 But those are things that we're going to be seeing later in the future. So obviously, C-Star S50 ZWO has put basically a stop to that because that type of thing is not supposed to be available yet.
But it is nice to know that they do have that type of feature planned for the future of the C-Star S50. But they're just trying to test it within certain developers so that when they actually release it, it will work perfectly and properly just like they want it to. Honestly, it's best for...
the customer themselves. So anyways, about the anti-dew heater, if you have the anti-dew heater off at the time of beginning to take your astrophotography images and then you go on to turn it on later 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, especially if you don't want to do later post-processing. Maybe if you just want to save the JPEG file. Just to look at you on your phone, just to say, hey, I took this picture.
If you turn this anti-due heater on midway, that could end up bringing in hot pixels because when your dark files are taken, it's taken at a certain sensor temperature. If you go on to turn the anti-due heater on afterwards, that temperature of the sensor will eventually change, meaning that your dark files will no longer be properly calibrated to the temperature of the sensor, causing the hot pixels later on. 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 saved each frame and enhancing if you plan on doing post-processing later on on Serial or PixInsight or whatever program it is that you use. Also make sure 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 degrees in the night sky 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 if you plan on getting a very high extended amount of exposure time, make sure to stop at around 65 degrees and then you can start it again after it lowers to 65 degrees below again. That would greatly reduce the amount of field rotation that you have in your final image and allow you the Seastar S50 to actually track much much better than it would if you allow it to reach that zenith.
Once it reaches 85 degrees, the tracking is no longer accurate. So make sure to stop it around 65 degrees 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.
The reason for that is because you will end up seeing star trails. If you're just trying to specifically track 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 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 for the really long exposure time please let me know i'd definitely be intrigued now if you go to the galaxy they have a lot of different options here If you look at the little icon, yeah, the little picture, you don't see any kind of icon there in the corner. If you go to nebulas 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, it is a dual 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 astrophotography on a reflection nebula, kind of like the Pleiades cluster, or other galactic nebula or dark nebula, it would be wise not to use the light pollution filter. 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 when you're trying to take a picture of hydrogen-rich nebulas or oxygen-rich nebulas.
Just to give an example of some astrophotography, let's go ahead and take a look at the Pleiades cluster here. First, we go to the, let's see here, it's the night's best. It should be right on here and there it is. You see it here, the Maya Nebula that's located within the Pleiades cluster. Go ahead and hit gazing and it will automatically go to that object.
All right, as you heard, object is now centered. So you can see this little bug. orange icon meaning that we are doing stargazing at the moment. Let's click on that and here is the Pleiades cluster. Now here's the light pollution filter.
You can actually hear it turn on and off which is actually pretty cool hearing the machine work. But first things first, what you're always going to want to do whenever you do astrophotography is do an autofocus. If you don't do an autofocus your stars are going to end up looking pretty blurred.
And the great thing about the Seastar S50 is that the autofocus is extremely accurate in regards to stars and also scenery mode and also lunar mode and solar mode as well. It's extremely accurate in pretty much all aspects except for planetary. It does need a little bit more tweaking with that as far as what I've noticed. Of course, if your autofocus isn't absolutely perfect as you would want it to be for your astroimaging, you can always use the manual focus.
which is an extremely handy tool that Seastar has provided for us. Alright, as you heard, autofocus is completed. 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, lower it down to even less, and...
Also this little mark button is only available once you start the shooting process. So just an example, you're going to see it take the dark frames here. It says preparing for image enhancing, improving image quality takes about one minute. Now when it's talking about the improving the image quality, it's just talking about taking the dark files in order to stack it in with your light files to reduce noise and basically just increase the amount of visibility you have.
without any hot pixels getting in your way. So let's allow this to finish, it should only just take about a minute. Start enhancing image. Alright, it is now starting to stack the images.
As you can see, it's taking 10 second exposures. And after the first 10 second exposure is complete, you will be able to use the mark button to basically register what it's looking at here. Alright, 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 C-Star to stop taking the image with that mark on, it will save your JPEG 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. Alright, so that pretty much covers everything that there is to know about the astronomical function of the Seastar S50. Of course, there's a lot more to be covered in regards to post-processing later on, but that's pretty much all we have in regards to the settings. on the C-STARS 54, the astronomy function. Of course, that's until mosaic mode 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 basically expanding the field of view that you can have in your image so we're going to allow this to run for a while and we'll take it in later on for post processing 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 the 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 any anything at all.
Obviously you want to make sure your C-Star is 50's level, compass is calibrated. Then you go ahead and take 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. Now you go over here to your C-Star app, you click on Solar, and click Install 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 Seastars 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 level 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. Now if you take your hand and put it behind the Seastar 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 sorry, the lens and the body of the Seastar itself. You'll see a line going through there that means that your Seastar is pretty much aligned with the 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 centered.
We press this button here, meaning that it is in the center of the screen. We use the auto re-center button and we make sure we do our auto focus on the sun. There you can go there you go you can see the beautiful sun spots on the sun it's pretty cool to watch this unfortunately as you can tell I do have some branches in the way of my solar image but we can go ahead and take pictures sometimes if there's a solar eclipse you can use the time-lapse function.
They have these different intervals so it will take a frame each one of these seconds. There's one second, two, five, ten, twenty, thirty, and sixty. That's perfect for if you want to do a solar eclipse 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, shadow is now getting in the way 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 because it's extremely high optics and the solar filter is excellent quality. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of storage space left in my Seastar, so again, I can't record a long video for post-processing. But I'll definitely show you another image that I took with Seastar S50 using the post-processing method that we're actually going to use for the moon as well. 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 Seastar, and that is just the shutdown process. Again, it's extremely easy. You exit out of whatever you're doing, you go to your Seastar S50 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 Seastar case and go inside. Alright so here we are on PC. Just a heads up, if you're going to transfer your files from your Seastar S50, to your laptop you have to make sure that your c-star s50 is turned on while you're trying to do the transfer otherwise it will not actually be able to show you any of the files so once you actually have it plugged in and everything you can just go ahead and check that out here 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 but what we're going to cover now is planetary solar lunar and then i actually managed to get several deep sky objects stacked 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 this is gonna be playing through the whole stacking process if you would like to see that while we actually do the post processing here so first things first obviously we're just going to copy and paste our files onto the pc so this will take about 10 minutes depending on how many things you actually have And once that's done, we'll get started with the first planetary post-processing.
Alright, so as you can see, we have all the files here. Now, there's, let's see which one this one is. We have Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, M45, NGC 2903, and the Flaming Star Nebula all here on the computer.
And I'm very excited to process these, especially the planetary, since this is honestly my first time actually doing the planetary mode on C-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 the planetary video stack in 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, I forgot what the other one is called, the pre...
the planetary imaging preprocessor 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 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 ok here you can zoom in to check the the bear 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, while it's doing that one, I am also going to stack the Saturn video. So let me go ahead and open it again. Just go ahead and drag this out of my way. Or not.
Let's go to the desktop. and open up Saturn video. Alright, again, catch it 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.
Alright, so as you can see, Saturn is the first one that finished stacking and it took about six minutes and 30 seconds. Jupiter is still running, but let's take a look at what we got here for the Saturn image from Seastar. Obviously we 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. 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, honestly, I find pretty cool. Hopefully you can agree with me when I say that.
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. Honestly, you can guys just go ahead and let me know what you guys think in the comments. 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. I do think it looks pretty neat, especially since, you know, it looks pretty tiny in the center of the screen here.
But honestly, I'm more looking forward to see what we can do 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 from the Earth. Maybe we can try these different planets when they are at opposition. It's more than likely when we're going to see the best amount of detail on these planets, especially with a sea star as 50. But there's these different controls here as well.
You can sharpen up your image even more, perhaps if you want to. Obviously, that doesn't look good for the Saturn planet. You can turn the brightness up and down.
Honestly, the controls on here are extremely easy to use and very beginner friendly as well. So make sure that you check out this program. Again, I'm extremely excited to see what we can get with Jupyter.
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 5267 frames at 10.17 gigabytes another reason i again will repeat if you're going to do planetary imaging with your c star make sure you have plenty of storage space that you don't want 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 i mean where is it and five different moons honestly that's very impressive for the c stars 50 uh i'm very impressed honestly we can turn out the sharpness level up uh 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 right obviously you don't want to oversaturate it it's looking a little bit green unfortunately perhaps the bear pattern was not done correctly so turn down the saturation a little bit more and we can tint that later on just the normal pictures oh actually we have this here so is the 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 and i'm kind of processing in programs like serial uh which i'm not really familiar with in regards to planetary i'm more familiar with that with galaxies and nebula and stuff like that but we can bring up the noise reductions a bit to get rid of the pixels that we have there turn down the saturation a little bit bring up this contrast just a tad 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 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 Seastar was able to do with Jupiter. Personally, I wasn't expecting it. Definitely wasn't expecting really to see any kind of anything with Saturn.
But we. here we are able to see the rings of course it's not like we're going to be using some sort of six inch dupsonian telescope no 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 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. Yes it was captured by a color camera.
Obviously I'm not 100% sure what the Bayer pattern is here but we're just going to leave it 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 stacked. You can go ahead and drag 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 1080 by 1920 resolution and we got 60 6 390 frames and somehow this one was still 12.34 gigabytes 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 c star so let's allow this to stack Okay after nine 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 images so you can get the most clarity possible now several things you can do obviously bring up saturation Again, we have that kind of green tint those people who are familiar with programs like Adobe Photoshop PixInsight would be able to bring out different coloration.
It's kind of like 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. 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 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 what we can do with actual astrophotography 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 serial with your C star s50 images obviously you want to check your preferences Make sure that you have in the preferences the Bayer pattern To set just give me one minute to load. It's gonna take just okay Bear information for files header if available make sure you have that checked if you're not sure what the bear mosaic pattern actually is It is not GBRG that was for the dwarf to it I still have it set as but it will automatically convert just like that for this obviously Because it has the dark files already built in, you're going to want to make sure that you use the script OSCP processing without darks, bias, or flats.
And you want to set your home directory, obviously, as the folder that has the lights that you want to use. So hit open on that, and we're going to use the OSCP processing without darks, bias, or flats. And we're basically just going to run through the same system in all three of these different objects. So the first one, the Pleiades cluster.
Alright, 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 deep sky objects as well. But let's get started with the processing. Again, it's going to be the same run-through through every single one.
So for the first one, M45, we click on our result.fit file, and as you can see, it's pretty small. The C-Star S50 doesn't have a wide field of view, so that's kind of the result of it. We only have the portrait. uh hopefully when we get that mosaic we'll be able to get more of that wider landscape uh style so we put in auto stretch unlink our image and here is our pleiades cluster honestly it looks incredible and i'm always blown away by the images that c star s50 is able to take but let's get started with it to make it look even better so first things first is our 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 so that it doesn't click on any of the actual nebulosity of M45. 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, we can go ahead and do our remove green noise. Just go ahead and do that.
Apply again. Once it's done go ahead and hit close on there. Go to image processing, do your photometric color calibration.
Obviously the great thing about Seastars 50 is that it automatically has the coordinates saved in here in the image including the focal length, pixel size, and will also let you know if there's any kind of filters built into that. So all you have to do here is just hit okay generally to 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 so now we go ahead and put it into linear mode and we start doing a star net star removal so go to star processing star net star removal allow that to load sometimes it does take a moment all right so now that we have started here we click on pre-stretch linear image and we leave everything else the same don't recompose the stars we hit execute here And it's just going to take the stars out so we can really work out with the background here. So allow StarNet to run and we'll come back to once that's complete.
All right, as you can see, StarNet is now done running and here's our pre-stretched image. Now, there's a lot of work that we can do with it. And this is honestly extremely basic run through that we're going to do with Serial.
So first things first, we do our image processing generalized hyperbolic stretch. 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 you go.
Now another thing that you can do is you can go ahead and select this part here, reset that, and use the eyedrop marker to set the symmetry point and start dragging it up once more. There we go, we get a lot more of that wispy nebula here like that. We hit apply.
Now we hit close. That should be okay for now. We go to our histogram transformation.
We don't want to cut out any of the nebulosity data so we go ahead and drag this up just to where our line begins. We can kind of drag it up a little bit more to bring that light back in and bring this up to the tad bit more to bring more of that darkness in. So hit apply here.
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 So go ahead and bring this up a wee bit it 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 over saturated So you kind of just play around frame it play around with it until you're satisfied So I'm gonna hit apply here.
I think that looks pretty good. You can do a color calibration to kind of neutralize the background Use Current Selection, Background Neutralization. That gets rid of a little bit of the colorization that we have here in the background. Then we hit Save, just like that.
And let's bring the stars back in. Go to Star Processing, Star 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.
Alright, there we go. I think that's looking pretty good. So we hit apply here, hit close, and then we can go ahead and save this as a unique file.
So there's our Pleiades cluster. That was just an extremely quick run through just to give everyone a basic idea. You know, we didn't do any deconvolution, any kind of pixel math. That's in later steps if you're trying to do more advanced work. 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, then we go to our remove green noise, apply, close. We do our photometric color calibration just like this.
Okay, obviously it couldn't really do that very well because we didn't do the stretch yet. Honestly, that does happen sometimes. 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 color calibration.
So we do star processing, star net star removal, pre-stretch linear image and execute. As you can see, StarNet 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 eyedropper and drag this up. Obviously that was not accurate enough, so we can go ahead and select a different area.
Reset that. Select the eyedropper, drag it up again. That should be good.
Hit apply here. Hit close and let's bring up the histogram a lot. As you can see, there you go.
Hit apply and we can drag it up even more. Apply and you can drag it up even more without cutting into the data. Apply, drag this down a tiny bit to really bring out that nebulous 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.
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 discolorate things. Hit apply here.
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, we do our, let's see, saturation stretch. Set the Synergy point there and kind of drag it up a bit.
Obviously not too much, but that's looking pretty good in my opinion. So we hit close here. Again, once again, it's an extremely quick run-through.
We do our star processing, star recomposition, starless result, and star mask result. Let's bring the stars back in here. Obviously, we don't want it too much, but just enough.
So honestly, I think that's looking pretty cool. So we save that just like that. Save as a 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.
NGC 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 galaxy is looking beautiful right there.
So first things first, we do our background extraction. Generate that. 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 is 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 OK. Okay, again, it did not work, and that's fine. So we get metadata from image. Let's type this in.
Maybe the coordinates are not quite correct. NGC2903. Try that again.
Hit find. All right, let's try that here. NGC2905 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, save our image. We go to our image. Start processing, start net, start removal, and get to work on that. All right, start net is complete.
It did not do a very good job in regards to the linear stretch, but we're going to try to do that ourselves. Obviously, generalize 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 select that one portion there. See, reset that, reset the eyedropper, go back to the original image and start bringing this up. Obviously we want to bring it up as much as possible 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. 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 that are generally, honestly left out if you only cut the black point without doing the rest of the histogram transformation.
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 image processing again, color saturation, drag that up. Not too much because 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.
Alrighty there we go, so let's bring the stars up to 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 liking how it's looking.
I think this looks pretty good. So I hit apply here. I'm satisfied with how my image looks and I'm going to say 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 mind blown that the sea star was able to get the banding here and even the great red spot even though it doesn't look that great in this picture you No pun intended.
Anyways, I'm still pretty impressed with what Seastar R50 was able to do. Hopefully you guys were able to get the same type of results as well. My lunar image, honestly, 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 Seastar, so it blows me away every time. Saturn, it's cool that we were able to see the rings.
Obviously, you can't expect to get the same results as you would get with like a six inch subsonian 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.
Let me know what you guys think in the comments. Seastar is always able to do an incredible job with deep sky objects. Now I will mention I do have an affiliate link in the description.
If you guys do purchase the C-Star S50 using that link, I will get a certain amount of the commission. Of course, it does not raise the price of anything for the C-Star S50 for you guys to buy it. It just helps out the channel a lot. So if you are going to buy a C-Star S50, if you could do it, it means a lot. Let me know what you guys think in regards to the results.
Hopefully, the tips and tricks that were mentioned throughout the video was able to help you with your usage of the C-Star S50 as well. Personally, Seastars 50 is a great tool. A lot of people say it's a toy.
I don't agree. I think it's an awesome tool for astrophotography for those who are both getting into it and those who are already experienced in astrophotography. So let me know what you guys think in the comments below. Please leave a like and subscribe.
Honestly, it does mean a lot to see the support from everyone for the channel. It makes me want to do more. 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 Siester of photography. Have a good night.