Sunlight adjustment.

Julio939

It seems that the application always tries to maintain the average brightness of the Sun. When the solar disk is not complete (rise, setting, clouds, eclipse...), the visible part appears overexposed, especially when the visible part is significantly small compared to the complete disk.
I would like to suggest the possibility of keeping constant only the brightness of the brightest pixel in the image. This way the overexposure effect would not occur.
I'm not asking for it for the eclipse, I understand that there are only a few days left, but I can't help but regret not having thought of it before.
Thank you very much and best regards.

Ray035

Yeah, that's how I missed capturing totality with my Seestar 50 during the total eclipse in 2024. As it was nearing totality, the thin crescent was becoming over exposed. I went to hit the control to adjust exposure and accidently hit the auto-focus button (the controls in the software back then were always on screen and it was much easier to tap the wrong one).
Hitting auto-focus caused me to lose focus and I couldn't get it back into focus (being relatively new to the Seestar, I wasn't aware that if I tapped on a location on the screen, like the thin crescent, it would focus on that point rather than trying to focus the center of the screen which during the eclipse was a blank black space).
So I had nice timelapse going of the point up to just before totality, but missed totality because it was out of focus. Fortunatly I had another scope going captuirng video on my iPhone of totality, but the image quality wasn't nearly as good as what I could have captured with the Seestar.

Nasa-HSIA

Yes, I agree. I know that HDR function in solar mode is added in S30 Pro. Can HDR function for solar mode also be added in S50 and S30?

Brille

Thanks, that's an important point for photographing the solar eclipse. @ZWO: Please let us know as soon as possible what's the best way to photograph the solar eclipse with the S50. I'm flying all the way to the path of totality just for this, and I don't want to have paid the extra fees for bringing the S50 on the plane for nothing.

Support@Seestar

Brille Hello,

We can provide you with a tutorial link for solar eclipse photography as a reference: https://www.seestar.com/blogs/tutorial/step-by-step-guide-capturing-a-total-solar-eclipse-with-seestar-s30-pro

The shooting method is generally similar for both the Seestar S50 and S30 Pro. （Please note that, compared with the S30 Pro, the S50 does not have a wide-angle camera.）

We hope this information is helpful. Thank you for your understanding and support.

Brille

Support@Seestar Unfortunately my Eclipse video with the Seestar S50 was all rubbish. The Sun jumped left and right as the Seestar tries to Center the Sun.

R.G.R.

I shot a time-lapse of the solar eclipse using the Seestar S50. It looked pretty good while recording, but the final result was problematic. In large parts of the video, the sun kept jumping back and forth. I broke it down into individual frames and realized what had gone wrong: the Seestar had alternated between centering on the sun and centering on the moon 😢.
I then used the software PIPP to center the images on the sun and reassembled them into a video. That worked in principle, but for the frames centered on the moon, the sun was often cut off at the edge. PIPP discarded those frames 😢. If I were to somehow put them back in, the sun would appear cut off at the side in parts of the video. Capturing a solar eclipse isn't quite as simple as the Seestar tutorial makes it out to be 😬.

MartinK

R.G.R.
I experienced exactly the same issue. Same healing strategy with PIPP. The result is quite ok, as you described, but many frames missing in the middle of the sequence, so that the timelapse is not so smooth as it could be. ZWO should probably think about a special eclipse-mode with an improved centering strategy (and adressing the exposure-problem too) ☝️