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.)
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.
Over 4 hrs of integration stretched out over 2 days for this one. Still needs more time, but I did what I could with what I had and it is not too bad.
The Ghost of Cassiopeia – 4.2 hrs exposure over Dec 30 & Dec 31, 2025.
The Crab Nebula supernova remnant in Taurus. The Chinese, Mayans and others saw It when it blew up in the year 1054. It contains a pulsar (neutron star) at its center.
This was taken with a Seestar S50 Smart Telescope using 30 sec sub-images. It has about an hour of total integration time that finished up just after midnight last night (12:24 A.M., Dec 24, 2025.)
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It was not the best night in terms of transparency, so I put a lot of time imaging this object thinking I could get past that with enough sub-images. Unfortunately, 2.5 hrs was still not enough under those conditions.
I couldn’t boost this image the way I wanted since it was still pretty noisy. Plus, my flat, which I have since replaced, was faulty with a green blotch on the mid-right side. I think I’ll re-image this one now that I can better calibrate it with a new flat.
A rainy day project to combine all the data taken with the Seestar S50 that was not parts of any mosaic mode sessions. It seems you can only restack non-mosaic mode sub-images, so I did that and came up with this image below.
After waiting a while for the tech to mature, I decided that a Smart Telescope would be fun to play with. So, I got the cheapest one on the market.
ZWO built it originally and they spun off a new company called Seestar to market it. In this case, the unit is the Seestar S50, a 50mm triplet in an all-in-one design including mount, camera, computer and storage.
Here’s the first light images from it:
I was trying to get more data on 12P/Pons-Brooks, but it was too cloudy and the comet was too low. So, I moved on to M42 and tried to get some shorter 30 second exposures that would not overexpose the core. They were added into what I had from the last session in the image above.