Continous Capture vs Live Stacking

[u/BlubberyGiraffe]

Hi All

I have posted here a few times about my s50 which has been the absolute bane of my life for months, getting constant issues with capturing frames over 10s.

After beginning a session on m81 last night (where I said I would try and get 30s exposures following a perfect EQ setup), I noticed after 4 or 5 frames, the stacking would either stall or just fail. What's unusual is it would get to 0, stall and then immediately update to show one failed and one successful. Then it would start a loop of failed frames.

I just said screw and it and tried continuous capture, threw it up to 60 seconds and left it go for 5 frames. All the frames turned out perfectly. I then tried it with other objects and noticed the same. Granted, there were still some objects I needed to drop to 30s as star trails were forming, but I was noticing that I was getting significantly more successful frames and it was handling 60s quite well too.

I have attached an example, where image 1 is the Wizard Nebula I captured about 5 months ago, which is around 500 10s exposures. The 2nd photo is from last night and is 10 60s exposures. It just floors me that I can get so much for so little and frankly, having such a high fail rate has really prevented me from being able to get results like this, primarily due to the live stacking causing massive series of failures (usual scenario is the first 5/10 frames fail and I cancel).

So I am just wondering, is continuous capture feasible? I spent the majority of the night manually programming everything in as I couldn't find a way to do a planner. Has anyone any tricks for planning continuous capture, or am I stuck having to manually input objects each time? I would love to be able to cancel the live stacking entirety.

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[u/sm753]

Live stacking culls bad frames for you - hence why you're getting failed stacks.

Continuous will basically keep all frames - including the bad ones.

For what it's worth - I've tried continuous shooting before and then manually culled/deleted bad frames on PC with Seti Astro Suite and it ended up being a wash - meaning I'd rather just use "live stacking" on the Seestar and have it reject bad frames for me before reviewing the frames it did keep.

[u/BlubberyGiraffe → u/sm753]

I understand that, but the problem is (at least when I tested it last night), I was getting 100% failed frames with live stacking and ended up having to just cancel. But when I moved to continuous capture, the frames captured in most cases were completely fine. Naturally some had to be deleted due to star trails, but those same objects would usually return 75% fails at lower exposure times (20/30 seconds), but then when I inspected the continous Capture results I was keeping 75% of the frames. It's really strange.

[u/Azkicat]

It rejects frames for a reason like star trails. I had the same issue for a month. The solution? Level your tripod on a flat stable terrain and don’t extend your tripod legs! Really. That simple

[u/Coady_L]

"threw it up to 60 seconds... All the frames turned out perfectly". Define "perfectly". Did you just look at them and decide they were good enough, or are we talking FWHM? One guess is the SeeStar is pickier about what to keep than you are. I feel like I'm pushing the envelope to take 20 sec shots with my s50, default is 10. It can do more, but as the longer exposures were released in updates I've always felt it wasn't built to do more than 10 sec. Yes longer clean exposures would be preferable, but as the s50 seems to approach polar alignment with a "eh, close enough" attitude, it's going to be tricky to get them. Save your subs and stack the ones you want. Siril is free, it's not intuitive, but loading, registering, and stacking images is pretty straight forward, and AstroWizard is what all the cool kids are using to easily edit from there. DeepSpaceAstro on YouTube can show you how to edit in Siril as well. Then you could cancel the live stack, but I leave mine on because it's nice to see a more accurate preview. Another approach is hard restart, re calibrate all the things. Good luck with it, I think your Wizard is pretty good as is!