This is a longer post, to put it mildly, but an important one I think, so please keep reading. If you think this is a good idea then add your comments and maybe ZWO will notice and listen.

I want to start by stating that I am not affiliated with ZWO in any way and I did not receive a free S50 to write this. I am both a very happy and unsatisfied customer at the same time. Keep reading and you will see what I mean.

So you just got your new S50, but the weather just happened to get cloudy the moment it arrived. You are not alone. But sooner or later a clear night comes and nothing can describe the thrill of seeing the first deep sky image capture building up in real time on your phone in just a couple of minutes as you watch. You can see over one thousand stars in a single 0.72x1.28 degree frame, when you can barely see 100 stars or so with the naked eye over the entire sky, or maybe even less if you live like me in a heavily light polluted Bortle 8 zone.

Yes, the S50 works unexpectedly well, the stars are all round and small and you can see some down to magnitude 16 if you try really hard. No die hard astrophotography hobbyist would want one, unless it is used as a second or third unit, especially when traveling. But it does not cost $5000, it costs $500, and it provides amazing results for that money. The SeeStar app looks nice and slick and it works, but it is incredibly limiting, and this is where ZWO needs to listen and make some simple changes that can greatly affect the future of this product. Because the entire usage model of the app is flawed. The idea behind this model is that a human is available all the time to press on app buttons and operate the S50. You have to be there to do the self-leveling, chose a target in SkyAtlas and then start acquisition. And you also have to be there 2, or 5, or 60 minutes later to stop the acquisition, otherwise you get absolutely nothing. If you want to capture 10 different targets with 10-minute exposures each, it will take about 3 hours and you will have to be there all the time, to press the buttons on the damned thing. In the middle of the night. Every night you plan to use the S50 from now on. This is crazy.

The first night you do this it is very exciting, the second night it is boring, and for most normal users there will not be a third night, which is a shame, because the S50 is an amazing product and it deserves better than gathering dust in a corner, sitting unused. It should be on and capturing images every hour of every clear night, but who has that kind of time to babysit it? Because the S50 does absolutely nothing unless a human is present at all times during the capture process.

What the usage model should be instead is this. Keep all the features the app already has, these work for real beginners, first time users and so on. But anybody that plans to enjoy their S50 will need automation, an unattended operating mode, which should work like this: you use SkyAtlas to create a list of captures, each one with its own RA/Dec or Alt/Az coordinates, start time and duration (this is the total capture duration, the effective exposure time will be less than that, depending on how many frames are dropped). The S50 should do as many 10-second frames as it can in the observation time window available, then move on to the next one. You save this list on the S50 during the day and then turn it off. 5 minutes before the planned start, you place the S50 on the ground, turn it on and walk away, no cell phone required. It self-levels, does AF and LP filter selection before each capture according to your choices made earlier and then just follows the planed sequence of captures. You should be able to connect to the telescope at any time with your phone to make sure the sequence of captures progresses well and look at any captures already made, but at some point you should go to bed and sleep. Once the S50 finishes the whole sequence it turns itself off or at least goes to sleep too to conserve battery. In the morning you go collect your S50, transfer the images it captured overnight and plan the next session for whenever your next clear night happens to be.

This does not require any hardware changes, I am pretty sure the S50 can already do what I have just described right now, it's just simple firmware and app software updates. It is eminently doable and not even difficult if the SeeStar developers put their mind to it.

So what could be done with the S50 if it had this feature? Fasten your seat-belts because we are going on a really wild ride.

Do you want panoramic mode, so you can have a single picture of M31, the Andromeda galaxy (it is five times bigger than the S50 field of view)? Now you can do that yourself and have a good night sleep at the same time.

Do you wish you could have a panoramic picture of the entire sky, not just M31, at 2 arcsecond resolution? Would you like to be able to use your S50 any night, including the cloudy ones? What about looking at stars only visible during the day, or obstructed by trees and buildings? Or objects you can only see in the summer but it is winter now where you are? What about using a good, low light pollution observation spot without having to drive 200 miles to get to it? What about looking at Alpha Centauri, which us folks in the Northern hemisphere can never see? Are you an Aussie wondering how Polaris looks like? Is it exactly at the North celestial pole? No, it isn't but it's very close. Basically, can we have a Google Maps like thing but for the sky? At 2 arcsecond resolution? That would be equivalent to the whole Earth with a resolution of 30 meters if you are wondering.

All this can sound like a feverish wild dream but we can have all that and much more within 6 months if ZWO decided to automate their S50.

Let's do some back of the envelope calculations to see how feasible this would be. The S50 field of view is 0.72x1.28 degrees. If you cover the entire sky in 0.5x0.5 degree square patches and take a 5 minute S50 exposure in the center of each one, you would have full coverage, no matter what the Alt/Az rotation of each frame is, with enough overlapping to stitch them all together seamlessly. The bad news is that there are165,000 such frames that need to be taken. So if you planned to do this yourself, it would take you many years and you could cover only about 70% or so of the entire sky from your location. Oh, and you would die of sleep deprivation before you completed the project, because you would have to manually make every single capture.

But let's say that ZWO implements this feature and there are 1000 S50s in the world right now (if ZWO has not sold that many already they are doing something really wrong, as this is a very good product and at a very competitive price). Maybe in a year there will be 10,000 or even more but let's use a conservative number of 1000 S50 owners willing to take part in this project. What would they need to do? Once a month, when there is a clear night at their location, you download a list of twenty 5 minute captures from a central server, run it unassisted and then upload the twenty 4MB FIT files to that same server. All this would happen automatically, all you would have to do would be to enroll, select a night that is clear for your current location and book the exposure list that would work for you. You would have to do this at least once a month to stay in the program. It would take maybe 5 minutes of each user's time once a month to book and 2 to 3 hours of unattended observation time. Why would someone want to do that? Because if you did this each month you would get free early access to all the pictures taken by everybody else enrolled in the project. You need to do this for at least six months if you want a full sky panoramic picture by the way because of the Sun and the way the Earth moves around it.

After that, we would have the whole sky digitized at 2 arcsecond resolution and this could be made available to anybody for free, Google Maps style. I am pretty sure Google would be more than happy to provide such a service, maybe even help with setting up the whole process. Maybe Starlink is willing to donate three terminals and the Internet service for a year, so we can place three S50s that ZWO might want to also donate, in remote but ideal for astrophotography areas in Chile, South Africa and Australia/New Zealand. A few units working full time there every night could do the work of hundreds of 20 exposures a month S50 users would and might be required to achieve full southern hemisphere coverage.

If big companies cannot afford a few thousand dollars to support this, even when it is in their own interest to do so, maybe we can fund-raise it, for example, non S50 owners could make a $10 or so one time donation, and when 200 of them get together, we buy an S50 and Starlink access for a year and convince a remote Chilean or Australian rancher to let us use his roof, in exchange for free Internet access for as long as he can keep the S50 running. What would these $10 people get? They would all get the same early access to the data that the S50 owners participating in this scheme do. All sorts of things are possible, sponsorships, funding through advertising, buy an S50 for a school that cannot afford one and they pay it back by enrolling in this scheme, there are so many ways this could be made to work. We could Kickstart this, there are countless other ways this could be done if you have enough S50s enrolled in the program.

So what do we all get out of this harebrained scheme? Everybody in the world would get free access to a virtual S50, you could see what a real S50 sees, but without any weather, day/night, seasonal or geographical limitations. You would not be limited to the S50 narrow field of view and would get any image size you wanted in seconds instead of minutes, or hours, or days even. I mean nights, let's not forget the sleep deprivation part. 40 million stars, tens of thousands of DSOs and nebulae, think about it, we could have all this within a year with minimal costs and a minor share of our S50's time.

If, and I cannot stress this enough, only if ZWO decides to implement this request for an unattended, automated operating mode. Nothing of what I described above would be possible with the SeeStar app as it is right now.

What else could be done with such a resource? I am sure some very real science is possible. This is no JWST but it can do things the JWST can't. We do not have to stop after six months or a year and keep going, archiving older versions of the digital sky map. Some people at ZWO might say "why would we want to do this, if everybody can have a virtual S50 for free, why would they want to buy a real one?" They would be wrong, even more people would want one, because you can take your own pictures now with a real S50 and compare them against the virtual sky. There are new comets to be discovered, asteroids to be tracked, supernovas that happen now and then and nobody sees them, star ocultations by solar system objects and so on. Every time you take a new image with an S50 it would be automatically compared against the virtual sky reference and any differences would be flagged. You could discover your own comet, named after yourself. Or a new asteroid that will bear your name. The very limited SkyAtlas (virtually no minor stars, no zoom-in to speak of) could be replaced with a much better version. The S50 would only gain and become more popular. Then ZWO will hopefully come up with the S100 and we start all over again, but with 1 arcsecond resolution, down to magnitude 18 and with a diffraction grating filter that will let us do spectroscopy measurements on millions of stars.

There are 90,000 public schools in the US and 30,000 private ones, let's say 100,000 to have a round number. If only 1 in 100 can afford an S50 and buys one, that's 1,000 units right there. If 500 students in each such school are exposed to their school's S50, do a school project with it and only one in 50 decides they love it and want one for Christmas, that's another 10,000 units - ZWO should ramp up their manufacturing right now to have them ready in time for next Christmas. If the parents of those children tell their friends what their kids are getting for Christmas and show them the S50 pictures they took as part of their school project, those friends might want one too for their kids, you get the picture.

Well, ZWO, I am sorry to say that all this will never happen, because you would never get a class of kids to come to school at midnight to press the buttons on the SeeStar app to do their own capture. Not without the automation feature I am proposing. But with it, each student could plan their own captures during class, the teacher could batch them together and after one or two clear nights they could all have their own pictures.

What kind of fun school projects could they do with an S50? Let's see, what about measuring the diameter of the Earth, measure the size and distance to the Moon, use parallax to measure the distance to all the Solar System objects, measure the speed of light using the moons of Jupiter, measure the proper motion of nearby stars, and so on and on. I am sure people smarter than I am can think of many more exciting projects like these. Think about our lacking STEM education and the horizons and opportunities this could open for at least some of these kids.

And after a year, the 99% of students that do not have access to a real S50 could use the digital sky and do exactly the same school projects using the free virtual S50. Not to mention all the children in the rest of the world, for whom an S50 is completely unattainable, if they have Internet access they could all do the same. I am writing this excessively long post, and tanks to everybody who made it this far, to attract ZWO's attention, but more than anything, I am writing it on behalf of the billion or so children who will never have an S50, but exposure to one could change their life, and indirectly change the world for the better.

So what can you do about this? For now, show your support for this idea in this forum so that ZWO notices us. If you think this is a good idea, you would want to get involved or if you know somebody that could help transform this wild dream into reality for a billion kids, please contact me directly.

What can ZWO do? At a minimum acknowledge reading this and state if they plan to add an automation feature to the S50/SeeStar app as described above or not and if so, when. Even nicer would be to state if they would want to support the idea of using thousands of existing S50s to create a 2 arcsecond digital sky map and especially if they would support the free/educational aspect of what I have just described. If not we should find another company that could, as I think this is a worthy idea.

Thanks again to anybody who has made it this far.