Muffin Hi, I had my S50 for a year now. I remember at the beginning a year ago being extremely frustrated by how finicky and unpredictable setting up the telescope was. I mainly do stargazing now, very little planetary, Moon and Sun imaging. It takes me about 4 minutes to set up the telescope from the time I turn it on until I start capturing images. I do not remember when was the last time I did any kind of calibration, I just turn it on, go through the standard star calibration and dark images automatic setup and it just works. The WiFi connection is erratic, I use both modes and both will eventually drop. But I reconnect and the capture continues without issues. I learned to live with that and moved on.
My advice to improve user experience when setting up the S50 is this: determine what the average focus setting is and make it the default. Point your S50 to an area of the sky without obstructions, it will move left and right of that about 20 degrees during the calibration process. Then you can go to your actual target, do a final autofocus (or not), use the LP filter (or not) and start capturing.
Depending on target and what I want to see, I do images between 5 minutes and 2 hours of accumulated exposure. As you accumulate more time, the stacking efficiency decreases, for me it starts at close to 80% and can drop significantly after that. If I get an average of 60% I am very happy. I was never able to make exposures longer than 2 hours and I do not think that is a good idea anyway. It is much better to do four 30-minute exposures and stack them in post processing than a single 2-hour one. This was very painful until very recently, but with the introduction of the new planning mode this should be easy now, I can't wait to try it.
Other people have reported success with mosaic mode, but I was never able to complete even a single one, I have never seen stacking efficiency higher than 30% and I have given up, for me it is a complete waste of time. I intend to use planning mode to set up my own mosaics and assemble them using postprocessing tools like Astro Pixel Processor.
The other very significant improvement is AI Denoise, which works quite well, but until it can process FIT files instead of JPGs is just a gimmick, with very little practical use.
