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.
