Useful apps and programs for using the SeeStar S50

starnet

If you want to do more than just take random pretty pictures of stars, nebulae and galaxies with the S50, here are a few apps and programs that can help. Most but not all of them are free.

I cannot recommend this app enough, and on top of everything, it is free. It is called Astrospheric, search for it in Android and Apple appstores. It will give you hourly forecasts a few days in advance for your location. I mean astrophotographic, not meteorological forecasts. It is a bit daunting at first but you will get used to it, I use it all the time to plan my nightly observation sessions and it is a huge timesaver.
Stellarium, this is not free, but it is worth the money in my opinion, there is a 7-day eval mode, then either a monthly plan or a lifetime license, both of them quite affordable. It gives you the sky down to magnitude 22 stars if you want that, at any point in time, past or future. In my opinion, this is what SkyAtlas should be, but rather than putting a lot of development effort into that, I think ZWO should partner with whoever wrote this app as this is a symbiotic relationship and both parties could benefit greatly from it. Stellarium even has a GoTo feature to control a telescope, exactly like SkyAtlas, it is just a simple matter of adding the S50 to the list of supported telescopes. It is so cheap but useful ZWO could include a license with every S50 if they get them in bulk. I check the weather in advance with Astrospheric, then plan my sessions in Stellarium and only use SkyAtlas to start and stop the acquisition. If the Stellarium could control the S50, you would not need SkyAtlas at all, as it is orders of magnitude better. The only merit SkyAtlas has is tight integration with the S50, but that's all.
If you are worried about your privacy (you should be), you need to know that sharing the *.fit files produced by the SeeStar app will reveal the GPS location of the place where the picture was taken. It's not super precise, about 50 meters or so, but if you want to keep the location private, do not share *.fit files as they are. Sharing *.jpg files is OK from a privacy point of view. There is a free Windows and MacOS utility called ExifTool written by Phil Harvey, which you can get from https://exiftool.org/ - it will reveal all the metadata embedded in the *.fit files, a lot of very useful information, by the way. The two fields of concern from a privacy point of view are called Sitelong and Sitelat. I have not checked that but I think ExifTool will let you even remove the GPS fields from the FITS files, if you want to share them without GPS information. The GPS information is useful to have but not really required unless you do some automated/distributed/remote access kind of acquisition project with multiple S50s and you need to know where each one is located. As a single user you already know your GPS coordinates or you can get them from GoogleMaps with better precision than the S50 so there is no real need to share this data. This is a security hole and it should be plugged ASAP.

I strongly suggest ZWO to turn off including the GPS info into the *.fit files by default, it should be an "opt-in", not an "opt-out" feature and it can expose them to liability issues - you do not want to get the lawyers involved. Or the Europe GDPR people. Including GPS data into the FITS files should be off by default, with an option for the user to turn that on, accompanied by a disclosure with strong warnings that doing so and then sharing the FITS files will reveal your exact geographic location. If I were ZWO I would put this as priority number one on the to do list, on top of any features we keep asking for here.

AstroImg@ZWO

starnet Thank you for your suggestions, and also thank you for your support of Seestar. We will consider your suggestions.

mtnlion667

starnet

I love Stellarium, so worth the money. Will check out Astrospheric, thank you. I'd like to add Clear Outside and Nightshift to your list. I use them both, on android, whenever I plan on stargazing.

Great info on the exif data! I second everything you said.

juliankit

Astrospheric is not available for my location and on my google play store.I'm using Nightsfit and Good to stargaze.
For stellarium you are talking about the mobile versione?

starnet

Yes, I use Stellarium on Android and it is amazing. I did the 7-day eval and then got the lifetime license, about $25 if I remember correctly. There is a free Windows version but it is very different and I do not like or use it that much.

starnet

I forgot to mention Siril of course, a free and open source (source code available) post-processing program for Windows, Mac and Linux. It can do amazing things with your FITS files but it has a quirky interface and quite an uphill learning curve, not something you learn to use in half an hour, no matter what YouTube videos say. And then there is PixInsight, reputedly even better and harder to use and it costs 300EUR.

LA3QMA

Im using Stellarium+ app and have added the FOV for the S50. I like both the Seestar app and Stellarium but the usage is a little different.

Anyhow Siril i have tried and its not that difficult but it seems that people use it differently. And also people have different taste regarding how the finished picture should be.

My first try i was following this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyKw06fz8LU

I also like this: https://theskylive.com/ that i discovered a few days ago.

sea_change

I also use SkySafari 7 Pro. I adore that app. It's my go-to stargazing app.
I also use Astrospheric and Clear Outside, and to a lesser degree, Nightshift.
And for those who forget what they photographed or want to see names of everything in their photos, astrometry.net.
Astrometry.net has helped me loads in the past when I was doing straight DSLR astrophotography with a standard tripod. (I was just aiming and praying...then identifying images later.)

mark.bird

Good afternoon ZWO team

Firstly I wanted to say thanks for creating a fantastic telescope. I've enjoyed every moment of capturing all of the astronomical sights in the night sky

I had a possible suggestion for the Seestar app which i wanted to run by you.

Currently in the planning mode (which is great by the way), if the sky is forecast to be partially cloudy during a planning event, sometimes the observation will fail. If this happens during sleeping hours, if you've left the telescope setup to shoot overnight, you can sometimes miss opportunities once the clouds part while you are asleep.

I wondered about the possibility of adding an automated reset to the planning mode so that if an observation fails during your set shooting time, it will periodically reattempt so that you don't miss any shooting time on an object should the clouds part enough.

Just a thought. Thanks again!

Kind regards

Mark Bird