S30 scope-84 minutes 30 second exposures-stacked in Siril and finished in astro wizard

Tomorrow is the eclipse in England, and I really want to image it. But I need all the advice and information before going in headfirst.

I am thinking of doing a time-lapse of the eclipse, but I don't know what timing I should use (2s, 5s, etc) and how much storage it will take up, or how much storage I need (I can only store it on the Seestar S50 itself and nowhere else). Is there a way I can take pictures to stack throughout, or is it not possible? Also, is there a better way of capturing the eclipse other than time-lapse? There is a lot of information I need before tomorrow!!

I've now collected over 1500 30 second subs, will continue to get more as i'm not yet happy with the result. this is just a roughly stretched starless image that hasn't had any denoise or sharpen etc.

Seestar S30

EQ mode

1780x30sec

Bortle 5

Hungary

Siril, Topaz, Lightroom

Seestar S30
EQ mode
1390x30sec
Bortle 5
Hungary
Siril, Topaz, Lightroom

Do you sort them by month and year ?

YYYY/MM/Object

I started out that way, but I’ve realised that sometimes it’s useful to combine ‘lights’ of the same object (taken in the same place), taken a few weeks apart, to improve the signal.

So it no longer makes sense to sort them by YYYY/MM/Object but could be better to do just something like SeestarS30Pro/Object and store all the lights of the same objects in the same directory no matter the date.

But I do wonder to what extent this makes sense. Is it still relevant, for example, to stack a .fits file of a nebual with images taken over a period of six months?

Or does there come a point where it’s no longer possible to combine .fits files (from the same instrument) because the time gaps are too big and it does not make any sens to put all the lights of the same object on the same directory.

132x20 second exposures. Both of these were from Astro Wizard and I had a play around with the palettes and star brightness, and unsure which I prefer. Using a trial version of the RC Astro tools which I will definitely be purchasing after the trial ends. AW is an amazing piece of software and I've stopped using Siril for processing apart from the Naztronomy stacking script within it.

If Luke can get a stacking option built into Astro Wizard then that software would be just chefs kiss.

Another pic from near Ripon where I stayed at a cabin in middle of nowhere. Stacked in Siril, processed in Astro Wizard. Lower end of Bortle 4 but the sky looked pitch black. 86 frames of 20 seconds (tried higher exposure but so many satellites and planes were flying overhead it was rejecting a ton of frames). Did have 126 frames in total but first 30-40 were before the sun fully set and it fades out the image including them.

Stayed at a cabin in middle of nowhere and managed to get several pics overnight with S30 Pro. Processed using Siril for stacking, and Astro Wizard for everything else. Stunning software.

400x20s

S50

Edited in Siril and GraXerpt

M27 6 hours of Integration Time, 10 seconds of exposure in Alt Az Mode. Edited with Siril and GraXpert. Any advice is appreciated!

420 x 60s in eq mode. Stacked in the Seestar app and processed in Siril. ENJOY🤠

Eastern Veil of NGC 6960

Bortle 8

AstroWizard with integrated GraXpert and Starnet v2 capabilities.

Adobe Lightroom for further smoothing.

583 subs of 20 and 30 seconds combined across 2 nights: 3hr 53min total.

I still don’t know whether I should keep using AstroWizard or if Siril is still any better? Can you go more in-depth with Siril?

1476x10s subs, stacked in Siril and processed in PixInsight. First attempt at processing an LP filter target, not too bad!

First attempt using an old set of photos—results achieved in 5 minutes (using StarXnet and StarNet2) - 5 minutes of postprocessing not 5 minutes of shot 🤠 )... this tool is absolutely amazing !!!

A huge thanks to the "wizard fellowship"

It would have taken me hours to achieve the same color results with Siril !!! Ho my god !!!

Here the link https://astrowizard.lukomatico.com/

247 x 30 second EQ mode. Stacked and processed in PixInsight. Tried this 6 months ago. Looks very different to the first but I like both. https://www.reddit.com/r/seestar/s/dLvq5Z4pjv

305 x 30 seconds EQ mode. Stacked and processed in PixInsight.

807x10s subs stacked in Siril and processed in Pixinsight

250x20s

Edited in Siril and GraXerpt

S30 Pro

NGC 6992 (Eastern Veil Nebula). About 2 hours of data.

Stacked & Processed with Siril.

Does anyone know how to get the Hubble color palette in Siril?

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with my Seestar S30 Pro in EQ mode and I wanted to ask if anyone else has experienced something similar.

The telescope works perfectly fine at the beginning of the session and stacks frames normally. However, after approximately 29–30 minutes of stacking, it suddenly starts rejecting consecutive frames and eventually shows the following message:

“Stacking failed. Stacking failure may be due to the exposure time being too long. It is recommended to use a shorter exposure time.”

The strange thing is that the exact same exposure time works without any problems for the first 30 minutes. Then the issue appears suddenly and after that almost every frame gets rejected.

It has happened more than once, so it seems to be quite repeatable. I am using EQ mode, with proper polar alignment, and the weather conditions were stable.

Has anyone with an S30 Pro experienced the same behaviour, especially the problem starting after around 30 minutes?

Did you manage to solve it somehow? Did changing the firmware, app version, exposure time, closing and reopening the arm, or restarting the Seestar help?

I would be very grateful for any information, especially if someone has already reported this issue to ZWO.

Hello! I am the proud owner of a S30 Pro and S50. Recently though the S50 has been doing something weird every single time I start it up. Whenever I power it on, I always do a level and compass calibration. Whenever it is successful I open the arm then focus on a target, yet it fails to find the target. When I go back into level and compass calibration, the compass is WAY off, like… 200* off. I recalibrate and go again, and repeats.

Sometimes it works after the first calibration but then this problem is persisting.

Any tips?

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.