Seestar S50 Polar Alignment and Operation
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- Опубликовано: 18 янв 2024
- In this video, my son Reynold, "King of the Dark," and I (Boyd Edwards) brave the elements to show how to polar align our equatorially mounted Seestar (see • Seestar S50 Equatorial... and • Seestar S50 Equatorial... ), and how to orient the Seestar to the equatorial view of the sky so you can use the Seestar app to find and track objects automatically, the same as you would in altitude-azimuth mode.
The portion of the video that shows how to orient the Seestar to the equatorial view of the sky begins at 1:18.
The advantage of mounting the telescope equatorially is to eliminate field rotation and to improve tracking and frame acceptance rates. We've shot some amazing images in equatorial mode (see / 348716674607288 , and we've logged some excellent frame acceptance rates (up to 73%).
The current version of the Seestar firmware (as of Jan. 19, 2024) restricts you to observe only half of the sky. For northern observers, equatorial mode allows you to see only the stars in the northern celestial hemisphere, the same view of the sky that you get from the north pole. For southern observers, equatorial mode allows you to see only the stars in the southern celestial hemisphere. For now, northern observers who want to view an object in the southern celestial hemisphere, such the Orion Nebula (M42), will need to use altitude-azimuth mode or to polar align to the south celestial pole, a suggestion by Kai Yung, founder of the Smart Telescope Underworld, / 373417055173095 .
Northern observers who desire to polar align to the south celestial pole could reverse the direction of the red-dot finderscope on the Seestar base and point this finderscope at the north star, and then bingo, the Seestar would be pointing at the south celestial pole. One would have to figure out a way, though, to point the Seestar below the horizon, because the Sky Watcher wedge (that we use for our equatorial mount) will only allow you to point the Seestar above the horizon.
Just before publishing this video, we learned about apps (Polar Scope Align Pro for iPhone and Compass Steel 3D for Android) that can be used to polar align the Seestar, which would eliminate the need for a second red-dot finderscope (See the Smart Telescope Underworld post by Bro Mac; / 383692670812200 . We've not tested these apps, but we mention them here in case some of you might be interested.
Appreciate you guys venturing out in the freezing cold for this amazing video! My Seestar is being delivered today so I'm thankful for all of this!!
I’m sharing this with all of my astronomy contacts! Great demo!
Excellent video! Thank you very much for sharing it!
Thank you for all that you do. 🤠
LOve it. Subscribed. a most excellent presentation! Good job, thanks for the inspiration. Anxiously awaiting your followup polar alignment and hoping youll share your capture workflow and especially your live imaging in EAA. PLEASE !👏👏👏
Awesome Video!!!!! Thank you!!!!
thanks for the followup
Very nice explanation. Limitation of only see one half of the sky is something I did not know.
How much of the sky you can see depends on your latitude. If you live at the north pole, you can see the entire sky that is visible at that latitude. If you live at the equator, you can only see half of the sky (either the northern half or the southern half). At my latitude of 41 north degrees, we can see about 3/4 of the sky. The only part of the sky we cannot see on the equatorial mount are objects near the southern horizon.
I suspected polar alignment would limit you to viewing objects above the celestial equator… This video confirms that. Well done great explanation.
Not sure why you'd want to point to objects in another hemisphere which you can't see through the ground?
@@abulka From our location north of the equator we can see the sky south of the celestial equator by a considerable amount. At 44 degrees north (Ontario Canada) we see the sky directly to our south at a point 46 degrees below the celestial equator. The stock SeeStar sky model is designed for a horizontal reference. The equatorial hack involves tilting the mounts horizontal axis until it lines up to the celestial equator. However in it's stock form the SeeStar will not point below the horizon...The benefit of the hack is that it eliminates field rotation by allowing tracking equatorially, The down side is that the scope will not to point to the sky below the celestial equator...which now coresponds to the scopes original horizon limit. To point the scope south of the celestial equator in this BS equatorial mode will take new firmware supported by ZWO...this is not currently on their radar..
Great couple of videos, may I ask what is the Newar attachment you have added to the setup, thanks in advance.
I wonder if we can mount on a star tracker like Sky adventure. Disable the horizon detection, let the Sky adventure do all the tracking.
All Tesla owners know about the last few seconds of this video!
How about a video on using an iPhone app Polar Scope Align Pro to take the place of the finder scopes?
Hello
One question: Every time I turn it off and on again do I need to do this procedure? or does the system remember it?
I think zwo will update their software later to be able to do it automaticaly. Just need to add the équatorial wedge.
You are very clever!
Well, thanks!
Excellent and very helpful video thanks. I've tried this (southern hemisphere, in New Zealand, but so far can't get it to give me gotos and tracking that works after the process). After seeing your video I think I may have not used a suitably located bright star to manually slew/sync to for my 38 deg S latitude, so I'll try again with a different, more southerly bright star, and I may have also been too slow after the manual slew to the star to then search for/select/sync the star in the Atlas and get back to start the 3 star align/calibration, so maybe my star had drifted too far in that time for the 3 star align to give a usable result and good gotos/tracking for other objects. That inexplicable and unexpected "return to origin, no object selected" automated slew at at the end of the process properly confused me when I tried this process, so its good to know I can just cancel out of that. Great detail in your video on things like that thank you, as the detail in these sort of things can make all the difference in getting success or failure.
I have a question. Do I need the Seestar's compass freshly calibrated for this to work? I ask because I tried to do a compass calibration first, but my Seestar simply won't do a compass calibration while the Seestar is tilted at my 38 degrees south latitude angle in polar orientation. The green circle in the compass calibration rotation circle never appears. I can do a compass calibration while the Seestar is in normal vertical/altaz orientation, but once the unit is tilted over at 38 degs the compass calibration doesn't work, no green arc ever appears in the grey circle in the app.
I believe it was Kai Yung who said the compass calibration is important. We haven't bothered with it the last three times we have polar aligned, and it has worked fine. Good luck in getting yours working.
If you didn't get uncontrollable shivers for a half hour you weren't cold enough. Good luck. There's always a phone app like ps align pro to polar align setting the phone on the side of the casing.
❤❤❤❤❤❤
The last comment you said the SkyWatch wedge won’t allow you to point below horizon. Did you mean location horizon or celestial horizon?
Very similar to how I do it except I use laser pointers so I don’t have to get on my knees, might want to crop of the last bit with you getting back into the Tesla.
Yes, lasers are a great way to go!
Can Seestar S50 track the launch of a SpaceX falcoln 9 or the Starship?
Might be me but I thought the seestar was a quick and fun way into astrophotography,if I wanted to kneel on cold or wet ground to polar align then I may as well get my eq mount out with all the usual gear and get I higher quality exposure. The seestar is great and I love mine as it allows me to get quick sessions in between the variable weather conditions we get in the UK so I would never bother to go to this length as it does have its limitations with quality of pictures due to its size.
I also live in the UK and know exactly what you mean.
I am from Ohio and I get it too.
Why purchase something engineered to be ready to go and play . Then make it more work. Its awesome enough to have everything you need in the travel case it came with!
Some of us don't have higher quality equipment, and we're trying to squeeze the highest quality we can get out of the Seestar. Field rotation has given us fits in processing images from the Seestar in altitude-azimuth mode. Going to an equatorial mount has produced some beautiful images for us - it's so much easier to process an image when you don't have to worry about field rotation. So I'm happy that you have some high quality equipment to get images from, but I'm happy to kneel in the snow to get mine. Another advantage of polar alignment is the high frame acceptance rates that we're getting in that mode, up to 73%. A couple of minutes kneeling in the snow to polar align the scope has paid off handsomely in higher frame acceptance rates and better images in shorter times.
Nobody forces you to use an EQ-mount. However, there are a lot of people who are grateful for the explanation.
I am one of them 👍
Exactly. People always try to make easy things hard. There's no benefit to this overly complex alignment process which is meant for manual telescopes. The factory method will work better in most cases
Would an attached laser pointer, such as on the Move Shoot Move Rotator save your neck and back?
Yes. I've been thinking about doing this.
What happened to parker? Not trying to be rude, I truly appreciate your free lectures on the various topics in physics
I don't know what happened to him! I believe that he has graduated from Utah State University, and moved on somewhere.
Hello, this is a really informative video. Thanks much. I followed the process. However, have a problem. After the whole process is done, I go to stargazing mode to start integrating. But at this stage, I see that the machine is not tracking at all. See long star trails. In the usual Alt-Az mode, the machine tracks well - just to rule out any general tracking issue. Any suggestion you may have about what I may be missing.
This is the first I've heard about something like this. Was the sky clear and transparent when you did your experiment? We've had trouble in severe cold and when the sky hasn't been clear. Was the dew heater on and was the lens clear? My suggestion would be to find another clear night, make sure the dew heater is on, and try it again. Because of clouds, we've only been able to use equatorial mode on two nights so far, so we don't have a ton of experience with it yet. I have a hunch that low frame acceptance rates and poor tracking might often be tied to poor atmospheric transparency. We recently got the Astrospheric app to assess clouds, transparency, and seeing. It's quite good, and recommended by many astrophotographers.
@@physicsdemos Thanks again for your swift reply. It was cold (subzero in Michigan), but the sky was clear and the dew heater was on etc. Did not see any transparency issues. In any case, I would retry in a clear night, which is very rate in my location! In any case, thank you for your great work and helpfulness!
@@utskb15 Looks like you're doing everything right. Are you using the Sky Watcher equatorial wedge with its dovetail base mounted to the base of the Seestar? If so, is the set screw on the dovetail base screwed in so far that it contacts the Seestar base? If so, this screw might be impeding the rotation of the Seestar and the tracking, and you should back out the screw until it no longer contacts the base. See ruclips.net/video/9Pgy4dHBgA4/видео.htmlsi=CfRtST0Ji7sllTUS&t=1416 for more information.
@@physicsdemos Thanks agin. No, I am using a 3-axes tripod head that I use with my 150-600 Sigma nature photography lens. There is no obstructions in the SS’ movement. Only part that I may not have done completely right is the “synch” operation. I will follow your instructions on that when I try next time. On an understanding standpoint though, I am still not entirely sure as to why the synching would be needed. In my understanding, upon completion of the horizon calibration, the SS figures out the offset from the absolute horizontal orientation. Then it adds/substracts that offset to the Alt-Az values for GoTo as well as tracking. In this case, after the equatorial mounting is done, any horizon calibration would be sufficient for the system to know the baseline Alt-Az, and therefore the offset from the absolute horizontal. So, all GoTo and tracking (using Alt-Az algorithms - assuming that is what SS use and not RA-Dec based algorithms) should be able to be done at this point. Am not able to think why a synch would be needed. May be a synch would give another data point for correcting any remaining error from the horizon calibration. However, the drift during the time between centering a star in the StarGaze mode and pressing synch in the SkyAtlas mode can be almost 7-8 arc-seconds, assuming that transition will be around 1/2 second. Your opinion would be valuable. I would also do experiments when I get a chance.
If this long comments are inappropriate here, we can discuss over FB. I am part of the unconventional usage group in FB.
@@utskb15 We've not been successful in getting the Seestar oriented in the sky, so you can use the automatic finding and tracking features of the Seestar app, without syncing to a star. I would be very happy to hear if someone succeeds without this step.
So we need 3 star finders scopes on it. On pointing to the Polar star, one pointing to the southern cross and the 3rd pointing to the calibration star. :-)
You really only need the one star finder on the declination arm (the part of the scope with optics). The polar alignment can be done with a compass and the SeeStar app.
Did you heat the batteries with a dew heater? That's genius!
Yup. Someone else gave us the idea. This is the one we use: a.co/d/1m8ScJO
A lot of mucking around and defeats the quick setup. Takes 4 or 5 times longer setup time. and defeats the idea level then forget it, as you need all those other steps,and need to add 2 finders, meaning you cannot put in the case
100% agreed. Why go through all this trouble, especially in freezing temps? For me sort of defeats the purpose of purchasing this telescope in the first place. If you're going to go through all this, you might as well just buy a regular telescope. LOL!
No more sync icon in the new firmware release... 😩
Not true
If I need to find a bright star without using the "goto", how do I know which star I have found to enter in the search? In your example, you knew it was Castor. How would I find that?
You can use Star Walk or other similar apps to help you learn stars and constellations in the sky.
I dont think u have to do polar alignment
It helps to do a rough polar alignment because that will eliminate the field rotation. But you can use a compass and the Level Adjust dialog to set it close enough.
Good luck polar aligning in the southern hemisphere with this technique- sigma Octans is impossible to see with the naked eye.
😂 WHILE this is an interesting DISCUSSION, this complex procedure won't do much. The S50 doesn't have a true equatorial amount and the software doesn't work this way. You can just point your s50 in the general direction of the North Star and get all the same benefits. The only benefit is reduction in field rotation in some cases. You can do the sky alignment by simply selecting your target, centering and then syncing. But for most users, the easy factory method of alignment and auto tracking works very well. Simple... . Just like it's supposed to be
Seems totally unnecessary and defeats the purpose of buying this telescope. I'm getting one, but will NEVER do this! Glad you seem to get something out of it, but unless you can show photos that blow away the regular AZ/ALT mount, I wouldn't waste my time with all of these headaches. Especially in sub zero weather! LOL!