Hi,
I'm an amateur astronomer astrophotographer for more than 15 years of experience from Hungary. I rather focus on Sun/Moon photography than deep space objects.
The past months I heard a lot of positive feedbacks about Seestar S50 from my friends and saw tons of fancy images. So the last week I decided to buy one. Unfortunately I did it shortly after the release of the new 2.0.0 of the Android app.
Here are my first experiences: I was able to stack some excellent photos of the Sun and the Moon based on RAW videos. Also made my first steps on the field of galaxy/cluster photography.
However the last 5 days I travelled twice for photographing a specific event and both times the software failed:
Last friday I wanted to capure the transit of International Space Station in front of the Sun. I ran into connectivity issues:: connection lost twice and after reconnecting, the calibration/goto had to be done again and again. Finally I missed the transit due to the slow app response time.
Today morning I wanted to capture the Saturn-Moon occultation. I had started the preparations one hour before the event. And that one hour was not enough for the Seestar to find the 98% full Moon on the sky. I tried many ways: Solar System view of the Moon and Saturn. I calibrated the compass and levelled the camera to 0.1. Tried manual positioning. The screen was always gray.
Tried stargazing mode. Found Pleiades on dawn twilight sky, then again: the camera was unable to find either the Moon or the planet. Once I pushed something, and somehow, then I saw the highly overexposed lunar disk and Saturn-dot on the screen, but I was unable to reduce the brightness enough. Then I tried to switch back to Solar System view by knowing the camera is already pointing to the Saturn/Moon, I skipped the goto at first, but I saw only gray screen again. Then a "Goto the Moon" command finished by the camera pointing to obviously somewhere else.
Again: one hour was not enough for positioning the Moon properly in dawn-time and starting a video of the event. It was a VERY-VERY frustrating and negative experience! I'm actually thinking seriously to send back the camera to the seller and write a 1* review of the app.
Please fix the app 2.0.0 issues ASAP or give ability to rollback to the last 1.x.x version.