Comet Lemmon

I haven't had the Seestar out this year. Let's face it, once you get images of a few familiar galaxies and nebulas, there's not much else it can do. So it sits in its case waiting for something new to come along, such as a comet. Last night it was cloudy on the horizon and I got a bad image of Comet C2025 A6 Lemmon. Tonight it was better and I'm showing two images here. The first one was just before it set behind Red Lodge Mountain, which is the black area along the bottom. The second one is from a few minutes earlier and was the longest exposure time I managed to get. There are a lot of meteors or satellites or something streaking across this image. There was one in the first image, which I removed in Photoshop.

Through the binoculars, the comet was a faint smudge, aided slightly by averted vision. I could not see it without the binoculars.

The first image was downloaded later from the telescope and does not have the watermark. I though this version was a bit better than the phone version. The second image was downloaded from my phone and has the watermark. There is a large FIT file, the equivalent of a RAW file. But it has to be edited in a specialized program such as Siril because Photoshop can't load FIT files. Last year I found out this is not a straightforward process, so I decided any improvement over the automatically-generated JPG images was incremental at best and usually not worth messing with. Both images were processed from the JPG files in Photoshop to increase contrast and reduce noise.

ZWO has not released an upgrade to the Seestar S50 since I got mine last year, but has issued a firmware update with 4K capability. If the weather is decent, I will try one more time on Sunday, making sure that 4K is enabled. The native resolution still is 1920x1080. The upgrade bumps the image size up to 3840x2160 using Drizzle processing. From the three minutes of internet research I did, you need lots of images to stack to make this meaningful. Since comet exposures are not very long, 3-5 minutes, I don't know if it will make a difference for those. For deep-sky long exposures, maybe it will do something. (BTW, it seems the only competitor to the S50 at the price point of approximately $500 is still the Dwarf 3, although you could also consider ZWO's own S30 for about $100 less.)

This image of M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, is slightly better than the one I posted last year on my web site. This one was taken after I switched the setting to 4K, which I figured out was what I wanted to do two hours after the comet set. This is a 34-minute exposure.

It is now possible, with the proper wedge, to use the Seestar in equatorial mode rather than Alt-Az. This enables longer exposures of deep sky objects. I could try my old Meade tripod which has an adjustable wedge. I don't know how complicated the setup procedure is.

Two nights ago, I didn't get the Seestar out in time for the comet, but the TV anchor made a passing remark about the Northern Lights. I set the 6D out with the wide angle lens and figured, if nothing else, I would get star trails. There were a couple images in the middle of the night that showed a hint of the aurora way off to the north, but very difficult to see and not worth posting. So here are the star trails. I'm not going to do anything else with this image so didn't try to edit out the satellite and airplane trails. Exactly eight hours, 930 thirty-second exposures. For those who want to do the math, 930*30/3600 is only 7 hours 44 minutes. There's also the one second the intervalometer needs in between exposures, and yes, that adds up to 16 minutes over eight hours.