A quick update #

If you read my previous post on astrophotography, you may remember I had decided to order a Vespera II.
Well. Supply issues, long delays, and a price that was getting harder and harder to justify. I cancelled the order.

And I ended up buying a Seestar S30Pro.

Yes, the one I had dismissed mainly because of the sensor resolution. The S30Pro changes things a bit compared to the standard S50, and the community feedback was positive enough to convince me to give it a shot.

Unboxing and first session #

It's compact. Really compact. Open the box, take it out, install the app, and that's... pretty much it.

My first session was up and running within twenty minutes of delivery, which for astrophotography is almost indecent.

EQ mode from the start #

I jumped straight into EQ (equatorial) mode. I had read enough feedback to understand it was the right call from day one if you want to do proper long exposures.

And honestly, EQ mode on the Seestar is surprisingly simple. You just need to have a solid tripod and a Equatorial base. The app guides you through polar alignment, everything starts with a few taps. No cables, no Linux PC at 11pm in the garden wondering why the driver won't connect.

For someone who once struggled to manually focus a 15-year-old Pentax K-x on Polaris... this is a different world.

The ZWO app #

The mobile app is generally well done. Target selection is straightforward, live stacking works well, and the real-time result is satisfying even when the sky isn't perfect.

A few minor complaints:

The interface can be a bit slow to respond sometimes
Some options are buried a bit deep in the menus
The image library management could use some work

Nothing deal-breaking though. It does what it promises.

Image processing with Siril #

This is where it gets complicated — not because of the Seestar, but because of image processing in general.

Siril is an excellent piece of software, free and open-source, and the astrophotography community has produced great scripts and tutorials around it.

But it is time-consuming if you want to acheive "decent" result.

Between stacking, calibration frames, gradient removal, histogram stretching, star management... you can easily spend as much time in front of a screen processing as you did outside acquiring.

This is clearly the part that requires the most learning and time investment. And I'm clearly not yet comfortable with all the settings.

I've noticed that the real enthusiasts use PixInsight — but that's a €300 licence. Before spending that kind of money, I'll make sure I'm comfortable with the open-source tools first, which from what I've seen are more than capable of producing very decent results.

One (minor) disappointment : the field of view #

The S30Pro has a 120mm focal length at f/4, which gives a pretty wide field of view — around 2.3° × 1.3°.

As consequence most deep-sky objects end up quite small in the frame. M42 (Orion Nebula) fills it nicely, but point at something like M57 or M27 and you'll be cropping heavily — which on a sensor that's already not huge, means losing resolution fast. Exactly the thing I was trying to avoid.

There's a mosaic mode in the app that lets you stitch multiple panels into a very large image, which is a great feature for sprawling targets. But it works in one direction only: you can go wider, not narrower. There's no way to zoom in or narrow the field, which means smaller objects are just... small.

It's a minor gripe, and honestly a known characteristic of the instrument. I knew it going in, it's just more noticeable in practice than on paper.

Early verdict #

So far I'm enjoying it. The main bottleneck right now is the weather and my post processign skills. And maybe the wild field view.
But The ease-of-use to result-quality ratio is really good for a beginner who doesn't want to spend their nights debugging hardware.

First shots : #

M8 Lagoon Nebula #

Capturing M8 from 47° North is a challenge because it stays extremely low in the sky (20° max), forcing you to image through a thick wall of atmosphere and light pollution — but it looks like the S30Pro does the job correctly.
It's a stunning nebula, filling the frame nicely — but only visible for 1 to 2 months a year, and just 3 to 4 hours per night from my location.
🔭

The beautifull M13 #

Image is cropped due to the seestar S30pro wide field view :(

#astrophotography