The wait is over, at least for me, anyway. It came in on Feb 12, 2026!
😍
Impressive as the S50 is, the new Seestar S30 Pro may work even better for me, specifically when it comes to the bigger comets, like we had last year and year before last. Now, all I have to do is wait for one to show up. lol
These were the first light images for it. I took the Sun as soon as I unpacked it and powered it on. Later after it got dark, I tried it out on my favorite test subject for new gear, M42.
Unfortunately, I had poor conditions with below average transparency, a few clouds at times and horrible LP. But, at least I could see stars on the first night after it arrived earlier in the day. The astronomers’ bad weather curse after getting new gear avoided for once. lol
I hope to get to a darker location and put it through more tests and maybe even catch Comet C/2024 E1 (Wierzchos) before it starts dimming down too much.
At the beginning of February, we had some clear weather, which doesn’t happen too often for this month. I managed to take advantage of it and produced these 3 images. One was a short run (The Monkey Head,) but the other two were more involved.
M44 Open Cluster was a mosaic and took a little over 95 minutes to capture (286 x 20 sec.) The Tadpoles (IC 410) took two nights of imaging and I let the Seestar S50 stack the resulting two sets of sub-images. It was about 4.88 hrs of exposure.
M44 Open Cluster Mosaic, 286 x 20 sec, Seestar S50.
A moonless mid-month period with clear skies allowed me to get this batch of images over the course of a few nights. All were taken with the Seestar S50 in equatorial mode from the city (a Bortle 8/9 zone.)
Seestar S50 Mosaic of the Orion Nebula ComplexM104 – The Sombrero GalaxyM101 Spiral GalaxyNGC 4565 Edge-On Galaxy
“Lynx is home to the fascinating globular cluster NGC 2419. Although visually faint and small what makes NGC 2419 special is its distance; at 275,000 light-years it’s one of the furthest known Milky Way globulars. In fact, twentieth century American astronomer Harlow Shapley nicknamed it ‘The Intergalactic Tramp’ believing it to have possibly broken away from the Milky Way and headed off into deep inter galactic space. However, recent observations indicate Shapley hypothesis was incorrect and NGC 2419 is still gravitationally bound to the Milky Way just moving in a highly eccentric orbit.” – FreeStarCharts.com
The evening of Jan 12, 2026 was was finally clear enough to do some astrophotography with the Seestar S50. First night this year. The Pleiades was high enough out of the strong LP in my area to get something decent, so I went with that. I combined what I got with 63 minutes from last November for a total of 198 minutes and below is the result:
This was 3 hrs in one continuous run using 20 sec sub-images using the Seestar S50. Taken on Jan 1, 2026 in the early morning hours in Bortle 8/9 conditions.
I stacked 4 images of the Moon taken with the Seestar S50 in alt-az mode while it was still daylight and adjusted the stacked image to minimize the blue sky and make it look darker than it actually was.
