Mosaic Mode: Page 2 - ZWO User Forum

Mosaic Mode

bkushner

AstroNet@ZWO By then I'll be observing with the Vespera Pro. Heck the Dwarf 3 will have it before then. Oh well.

starnet

pupak This would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Seestar_S50

I've given up waiting for the Mosaic mode update and all the others and purchased a Dwarflab 3, boxed up my Seestar and stored it away. At least Dwarflab listen to their users and bring out updates quickly....

starnet

Seestar_S50 I am looking at the DwarfLab 3 too. I would really appreciate it if you would post your first impressions, especially as a former S50 user.

marvindj

I'm quite confident the S50 development team will release the Mosaic functionality when it has passed all appropriate functionality tests with a high degree of quality. They know what their competitors offer.

Great product. Keep up the good work.

starnet

marvindj I have been using the S50 for almost 8 months now and I am sorry to say that I do not share your optimism. Do not get me wrong, I like the S50 and I am a big fan, I am very impressed by what you can do with such a low cost unit. I like the price, I like the portability, it is an amazing product.

I am less than impressed by the SeeStar software, especially by the complete lack of progress over such a long period of time, despite constant requests for many new features on this forum. From my point of view the software reached a relatively stable state around January and nothing much has changed since. There is absolutely no difference in the way I am using my S50 today compared with 6 months ago, no new feature to make my life easier and or better. To make things worse, it takes now almost twice as long to do a longer exposure compared with what I remember from 6 months ago and new software bugs seem to pop up from the woods, like the multicolor parallel satellite trails. I remember the goto function in SkyAtlas just working months ago, today it takes forever and I just cancel it and switch manually to stargazing mode, the S50 is already pointing right but it is unable to realize that.

I remember doing maybe ten firmware updates over the time I owned the S50, with absolutely no new features added and the usability going down, especially in the last couple of months. Yes, the S50 is a good product and it works, but it does not seem to go anywhere and my patience is wearing thin.

starnet

starnet I forgot to add another thing, I tried to take a Moon picture during the day recently and the S50 was completely unable to find it. After wasting 15 minutes of my time on ridiculously failing attempts (and yes, I calibrated the compass and leveled the scope multiple times), with the S50 pointing in any direction but the Moon's, I had to manually point the telescope and the fastest way was by rotating the tripod, that's how silly and useless the screen joystick is. This too used to work in the past better than it is doing right now.

pupak

ZWO has already written off the SS50 and is focusing on a new model that will be released at the end of the year. In order to be motivated to buy it, it has to be qualitatively better than the SS50, so this is probably the reason why nothing happens for a year and only promises. Everything you want, the SS50-Pro offers you at twice the price.

bkushner

pupak What year would that be? It isn't going to be this year.

H

That’s tech for you. You either wait until a better model comes out or put up with what you have at present. For casual photos you can’t beat the Seestar with its current configuration.

I bought a skywatcher tripod and a levelling device and makes it so much easier to use than the supplied tripod

Night Sky

@AstroNet@ZWO
Second half of which year?

Rink

I was about to order a Seestar S50 mainly because of mosaic mode - I thought it was already available, a quick google search brought me to this thread and its not yet released, we are 2 months into 2nd half of the year. @AstroNet@ZWO - is this still going to be released? Would it make more sense to wait until you release the pro version of the S50 mentioned above at the end of the year, if the mosaic is only going to be available for the upgraded version of the S50? I was so excited to order one, until I saw this thread, I have it in a shopping cart from one of your authorized resellers at this moment, and thought to double check mosaic mode has actually been released, and here we are.

ZWOsupport

[unknown] Regarding the mosaic mode, wait for the surprise! Although an accurate timetable cannot be provided for the time being.

Seestar_S50

Will this new release update fix all the other issue that have already been reported in these post as well as give us the long awaited Mosaic mode?

ZWOsupport

Seestar_S50 Currently, some features that everyone is looking forward to are under intense testing. Although we cannot provide a timetable, we believe they will come sooner or later.

xfirf

ZWOsupport ,
hi there. Is there any way to apply for the beta of this feature?

Antonios Barotsis

ZWOsupport Could you give us any insight on whether you believe you can stick to your "this is coming in the 2nd half of this year" comment you made a few months ago? Waiting is fine, I would just like to have a general idea of how development is going!

Digital Don

While we're waiting for true mosaic capabilities with the Seestar, here's something that we can try. Microsoft ICE is panoramic software that allows you to combine separate images into a single panoramic image.

Take a look at my post on Cloudy Nights for an example. Looks like it has potential and is very easy to use.

Don

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/935088-not-quite-seestar-mosaic-mode-but-interesting/

starnet

Digital Don Thanks, it does work pretty well, here is a stitch of six 1080x1920 scenery mode pictures, the result is 2802x3262 (and I missed a corner, sorry about that, with the scheduling automation ZWO is working on this should no longer be an issue):

marvindj

Nice. I'd hate to think of the mess I'd make if I stitched together manually 🙂

starnet

OK, here is a more serious attempt at using Microsoft Image Composite Editor to create large mosaics:

The first important point to make is that this is based on the JPEG, not FIT files produced by S50. There is no processing done whatsoever to these files, this is not an attempt at creating good images, just a test for the mosaic feature of ICE. On top of that, the final image is 4817x7657, and bbs.zwoastro.com has a problem uploading both files larger than 2MB and also files with higher resolution like these, so I had to downsample and further compress it to be able to post it here. So the actual image looks even better, and using the FIT files with preprocessing in Siril would produce much better results. But apart from that, the mosaic stitching looks good and it was automatic, I did not have to do anything special. Just drop the files into the program and press a few buttons, then I got the image at the other end. It is pretty fast too.

Here are a few technical details:

the bright star in the middle is Sadr, Gamma Cygni, RA=20h23m08s, Dec=+40°20'16"
there are 15 1080x1920 images, uniformly spaced 5m in the RA direction and 40' in the Dec direction, a 5x3 array
each one is a 5-minute exposure, that's good enough for the starfield (stars of magnitude 15 are clearly visible), but way too short for the nebulae that fill all this area of the sky - even with a 5-minute exposure, 15 images should take about an hour and a half, in reality the total time was more like 3 hours because SeeStar/S50 can barely achieve 50% stacking efficiency, which is better than before the last firmware update but still dismal; the symptom is runs of a few minutes with virtually 100% stacking efficiency, interspersed with gaps also of a few minutes long where the efficiency drops to 20% - this has to be a software bug that I hope ZWO will fix
I am using the new "indirect GoTo RA/Dec" feature, I add the center coordinates for the images I want to take to the My Favorites list, I use that to GoTo and then I delete them. It would be very nice if you could edit a favorite once in the list, both the name and the RA/Dec coordinates, this is a very roundabout way of implementing a simple GoTo RA/Dec function
this is a work in progress, I plan to add at least 30 more images to this set, weather permitting

The conclusion is that Microsoft ICE can be used to create mosaics with the images the SeeStar S50 produces and it is not that hard to use. This sets the bar pretty high for this mosaic feature ZWO has been working on for so long, let's see what they come up with.

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