On Feb 16th, I went to a darker site with a Bortle rating of about 5/6. It borders on Bortle 4 in the south-southwest. I got the comet again, M45 and some more tests with the Milky Way mode camera, as the Seestar refers to it.
My first change to get out of the city and into the country (Bortle 6/7 skies) was Feb 15th, 2026. My first target was Comet C/2024 E3 (Wierzchos). I managed to get 50 frames of 20 sec each, even though the comet was very low to the horizon in the southwest. I generated a star-freeze and star-streaks set with that data. Those images are below:
Next, I switched out of comet imaging mode and into Deep Sky. I picked the Horse Head Nebula as my next target and let it run for 30 minutes. It did well, as you can see:
For the next step, I switched to the wide-angle lens and took some images of a large swath of sky. I left it pointing at the Horse Head and did another 30 minute run:
Not too bad of a night for Bortle 5/7 skies and it being a short night before a work day.
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.
More Seestar S50 Images taken from the city.
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.)
“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
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.
