Keep getting star trails with EQ Mode + Movie Tripod

Noah1337

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:

Seestar S50
Bortle 4, not much light around me
Tripod: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0BTNQ8VD4 . Seestar is directly mounted to the plate of that Tripod. It is firm and not lose.

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 :-)

Gordon

Noah1337
Did you calibrate the compass in Alt-Az or EQ mode? I ask because I was unable to do so in EQ mode.

Noah1337

Gordon Can't remember. I will try again now.

satch984

I have the same issue
Try yo use a weight on the lever of the wedge to balance the seestar
Personally i use a little weight of 500gr

Noah1337

satch984 Which lever do you mean? My S50 is directly mounted onto the plate of my movie tripod. I don't use any extra wedge or anything.

Support@Seestar

Need to rely on compass and horizontal calibration, please recalculate polar axis deviation, and avoid interference from magnetic materials

Noah1337

Hey,

update from today:

I set up my S50 again. Leveled it in the app, calibrated compass, did the pixel correction then mounted it back on my movie tripod. Aligned it to north, power button facing up. Leveled it until it reached 52° as stated in the app.
did the polar align deviation THREE times, until at 0.0/0.1
started to shoot a nebula target (at 20 sec exposures) which was somewhat in the direction of the waxing Crescent moon. Could not get a single successfully stacked image for minutes. Maybe because of the moon being to bright?
I stopped the nebula and started with the M3 Star cluster, which is 180 degrees in the opposite side. It was a bit better, but for comparison:
Start time: 21:42
Current time: 22:27 = 45 Minutes of capturing images.
the result is only 14 min of successfully stacked images.

That cannot be correct or am I misunderstanding something here? are 14 minutes of stacked images the nearly perfect result of imaging for 45 minutes?
I even did the "Get Polar Align Deviation" thingy 3 times today until I was at 0.0/0.1.

Please, what am I doing wrong? :-/

https://ibb.co/zT58xShR <=== Current Polar Align Deviation

Thanks in advance
Noah

EDIT: imaging M81 at the moment. Almost no star trails for whatever reason.

Support@Seestar

Noah1337
Try shooting further away from the moon to see if the overlay improves

Patricia6315

Noah1337
You are describing exactly my problem with EQ Mode. It only works towards the south, but then I often have too many star trails for a 20 second exposure.

milander

I have noticed that after repeating "Get Polar Align Deviation" many times, I have some problems to stack my images... This may be a coincidence or not !!!!

RubberBandit

I am at the same latitude and having the same problem, I too am using a sturdy video tripod and my alignment is near perfect according to the Seestar app, the scope also performs the calibration successfully. I have tried all the same adjustments as Noah but with very little success. I have noticed that when trying to shoot objects in Southern skies and low to the horizon that 30s exposures are not possible...Star trails prevent stacking. However, when I choose an object in the Northern sky and higher on the horizon (60°) I can shoot and track without issue. I have ordered a new tripod and an EQ mount from MSM which should arrive on Monday. So I will be happy to report back if this resolves the problem.

sthscan

you need a good, solid setup to have success.

I have a tripod without a pan head as I think a lot of pan heads probably are too flimsy or not fine controllable.

Is your tripod level before you put the pan head on? does the pan head wiggl when you put your seestar on it? did you ballast the tripod to help solidify it to the ground? is the tripod on concrete and not on a table, a car, grass or dirt?
Is the seestar top facing towards polaris with the body of the seestar and the plane of the pan head in line with the North tripod leg? In the polar deviation screen, are you settling for no worse than 0.3 in both numbers rather than being happy just under 1.0?

if you have a few things off, it affects the ability to do longer exposures and how many of those exposures get rejected. After some tweaks, I was able to go from 20 secs to 30 secs with about 50% image acceptance (so 30 mins of images stacked per hour of imaging). When I ballasted my tripod and got the seestar being perfectly in line with the wedge plane and tripod North leg instead of the seestar being slightly rotated out of that line, I got to about 85% image acceptance or about 50 mins of images stacked per hour of imaging. I feel like I'm ready to try 60sec images if that ever comes out.

marvindj

FYI...from personal experience using the compass on iOS...make sure you configure the compass to provide TRUE NORTH, not magnetic north. In my case (Toronto) its about a 10 degree difference. Easier to initially align....

Seestar_S50

I have the same issue at lat 51, Seestar S30 set up in EQ mode with 0.2/0.2 in the green and I still only get about 40-60% of the frames saved 'star trails detected' and frames drop but when I have both my S50 and S30 running set up identical in EQ mode the S30 is more likely to error with Star trails detected than the S50. Not sure why but frustrating 😕