Review: ZWO Seestar S50 All-in-One Smart Telescope
March 2024 :
After watching some YouTube videos and haunting the Seestar Facebook groups, I decided to buy a S50. For astro gear they are relatively short money, $499. You can run them from a phone or tablet and it is a self contained unit with a built in battery and SD card. The only thing I added was a power tank to run both the tablet and scope for extender periods.
First I have to apologize, the recent cloudy weather is my fault.
The other day I set it up in the window of my den and opened the window and imaged M42 for about 26 minutes as it came from behind one bunch and trees and headed to the other.
The Seestar can give you a stacked image or individual FITS to download and stack yourself. I did 3 separate exposures and the Seestar gave a stacked image for each (3 total). I then downloaded the FITS images and stacked them in PixInsight. Today I decided to find out how well the Seestar would stack all the images.
I didn't cull them to look for the best stars, just did all 177 10 second subs. Here is what I got.
I got this scope to use for the eclipse in April with a white light filter, and for outreach as I am tired of loading up half my Jeep with gear rather than an almost lunch box-size case. It is alt/az so can get field rotation as you can see from the image.
I think Skyscrapers should look into getting one or more of these for outreach. Greg Shanos also has one.
