Stellarium with Landscape overlays

starnet

One of the big problems I have when using the S50 is the fact that I only see parts of the sky, I have a lot of building and tree obstructions where I live. I need to move the S50 frequently to a few positions around my house depending on the Alt/Az position of the target. It is not easy to determine what can be seen from which location and it is very common to discover after attempting to calibrate and capture an image that you are pointing into trees.

If you suffer from this issue, I have found a solution. I am a big fan of Stellarium, it has a lot of good features that SkyAtlas does not. The phone app is not free, but the Windows version is. I only use SkyAtlas to point the S50 to a target and start the capture, all the planning I do in Stellarium now. There is no comparison between the two, it is like night and day. The moment ZWO gives us script automation, SkyAtlas is no longer needed.

Among many other things SkyAtlas cannot do, in Stellarium for Windows you can create and use multiple Landscape overlays. Essentially, I took 360 degree pictures with a Ricoh Theta camera during the day from the same spots I plan to use the S50 at night time and then you can superpose these images over the sky image in Stellarium. You see exactly what the S50 will see from the place and time you chose, which makes planning image captures much easier. You can tell whether your target is visible or not from one of your spots and between what times, avoiding running into trees or other obstacles. If you do not have a 360 degree camera, you can take multiple shots with a cellphone and stitch them together. You can even tape your phone over the S50 and use the joystick in SeeStar app to move around and take panoramic pictures.

I followed the instructions from this webpage https://astroescape.com/software-guides/how-to-add-landscape-to-stellarium/ and it worked pretty well. If you try to do this and run into issues you can contact me and maybe I can help.

Now if only ZWO would implement the automation scripts and the remote control features I keep asking for then the S50 would be a much more usable instrument.

starnet

What I mean is something like this:

You can see the night sky in Stellarium, with Alt/Az and RA/Dec grids and the S50 field of view, with an overlay image with all the buildings and trees that could get in the way. And since Stellarium let's you set whatever time you want, something SkyAtlas cannot do, you can simulate an entire image capture session and make sure your target is visible for the entire duration.

Then you can avoid running into this kind of problem:

As for comparing Stellarium and SkyAtlas, a picture is worth a thousand words:

KODA

I agree with you very much, Stellarium is very useful for astrophotography with Seeststar. And creating a landscape of your observing site is very helpful to plan your shooting.
Creating landscape data for Stellarium is very easy. I have also created several landscapes and use Stellarium conveniently.

starnet

I forgot to mention that there is also a free web-based version of Stellarium, you can use it with a web browser on any platform, https://stellarium-web.org/

It does not have the landscape overlay feature discussed above or the S50 red rectangle field of view thing, but otherwise all the features you need are there, millions of stars down to magnitude 20, nice images of deep sky objects, nebulae and globular clusters, Alt/Az and RA/Dec grids and coordinates, any place on earth and any time, past or future, tons of useful information about the target, on and on and on. Stellarium is everything SkyAtlas is not and the price is right.

I had a very long list of requested features for ZWO I wanted added to SkyAtlas but I have changed my mind on that - I do not need any of them anymore, the only feature I still want is automation so I can bypass SkyAtlas completely when using the S50, as Stellarium already does everything else I need it to do. If I could drive the S50 directly from Stellarium (it already has the ability to control other telescopes, just not the S50) I would not have any need for SkyAtlas at all.

Here is another set of comparison screenshots between Stellarium (the web version this time) and SkyAtlas with M101 as a target, both done with the same phone. By the way, if you haven't got your shot of SN2023ixf yet, the M101 supernova, it is still visible with the S50 but barely so and fading away very quickly.