I finally got one clear night after four weeks of cloudy nights. During this time there have been two firmware updates, not just one, so I was curious to see all the improvements. It turns out that what we needed most was a change of color of the on screen buttons from green to red and a rearrangement of the brightness and contrasts buttons from the right side of the screen to the bottom. Everything else got worse. For example, I remember being able to save intermediate JPEG files while doing a capture, that seems to no longer be possible.
I attempted another M31 2x mosaic because I am a glutton for punishment. The stacking efficiency is as bad as in previous versions, about 30%, nothing has changed there. For a 2x mosaic you need at least 3 hours of accumulated exposure if you do not want two unexposed corners. There is no way anybody can achieve a 9 hour mosaic exposure in a single night, it is simply not possible.
What is new with the latest version is that when the WiFI drops (this happens all the time, nothing new here), after I reconnected, I lost the live view - this has never happened to me before. I could still see the spinning wheel spinning and the progress of the exposure counter but all I had to look at was a blank image and the frequent messages about stacking failures:
I decided to let it run, because I did not want to lose hours of already acquired data, but the result was anybody's guess. If you are curious, what I got after more than 5 hours is this:
It's not bad if you ignore the upper right corner and the trees Andromeda decided to run into after five hours. It is clear that 2 hours are not enough for a 2x mosaic and at 30% stacking efficiency there is no way you can achieve that in a single night. So as far as I am concerned, the SeeStar mosaic mode is not usable. I intend to go back to 1x frame size images and stop wasting my time with something that does not work.
