Fellow Stargazers,
I'm pretty new to the Seestar. Having it since about 2 month. Now with the EQ Update, I bought a movie tripod to be able to mount it equatorial, but I keep getting star trails. Please see my setup below:
I watched all the tutorial videos, please see my workflow and let me know, if I did something wrong.
1. I power up the S50
2. With a compass App I turn the S50 towards north, power button facing up.
3. I go to the menu into the "Advanced features" and to "Mount Mode", which is set to "Az/Alt Mode"
4. I leave it in "Az/Alt Mode" and I tilt the S50 with my Tripod levers, until it reaches 52° (as instructed in my app)
5. I switch the S50 into the EQ mode.
6. I hit "Get Polar Align Deviation"
7. Once finished, all my values are off. (See the first screenshot)
8. I use the levers on my tripod to make the upper numbers both go green and wait until the green checkmark pops up. (Note: the bottom number is now usually of for a few degrees, not sure if that is expected/if that matters, but the top numbers again are green, so I assume that is fine) (see screenshot 2)
9. I leave the EQ-Mode menu and start to stargaze.
10. When using 10sec exposure it is somewhat fine, as soon as I start to use 20 sec. I receive a lot of star trail stacking errors. 30 seconds the same and even worse, I don't get a single successfully stacked image so far.
11. I tried calibrating the Seestar compass, restarted the device, did the whole process again, nothing seems to help.
Questions:
When using EQ Mode,
- Do I still need to calibrate the compass within the app?
- Do I still need to level it in the app? (I had a look at the level setting (the one that existed before the EQ update, which was fixed in the past, by adjusting all the tripod legs until that number became green) and that was not green as it was in alt-az before the EQ update and it is around 60 in a white number. I guess this setting does not matter anymore with EQ, right?)
- What am I potentially doing wrong here? I have clear skies, quite cold, around 3-6 degrees celsius, but I keep getting star trails in the EQ setup. :-(
https://ibb.co/jPd6HB3q
https://ibb.co/svP39RQG
https://ibb.co/Wpp9FB50
Happy for any help / suggestions :-)