Achieve Better Seestar S50 Results

When I bought my S50 in the Summer of 2024, I really didn’t hold high expectations for this little scope. It’s a first-generation smart scope at a very low price point, and it is a 50 mm APO refractor on a simple alt-az GoTo mount with some basic plate solving abilities. The camera chip used in it is the Sony IMX462, the same camera chip that is used in the ASI462MC planetary camera. It is not a cooled chip so it’s only capable of short exposures. I actually bought it to do fast captures on nights when I wanted a simple setup with the hope of doing the Messier catalog. Now I am even more interested in doing just that.

I thought after reading online of some people who are using Siril and PixInsight that I would give it a go and download my Seestar data and see what I could do in Pixinsight. There are no calibration frames, so you are only working with lights.

First a bit of prep.

Go to Process – Cosmetic Correction, check Use Auto Detect and select Hot Sigma and Cold Sigma, then drag the processing triangle to the desktop. This should make a shortcut to Process01

Now we can stack our images.

Go to Scripts -  WBPP – load all fits for the image (LIGHTS) – Uncheck Local Normalization, click select the directory where you will be stacking to, then click on  the Calibration Tab, select the light frames you are stacking, go to Cosmetic Correction and chose Process01, then click RUN

At completion of WBPP, open the master folder and your finished image is in there. This is where you move into your normal workflow.

I just run my regular PixInsight workflow of Image Solving, SPCC, Screen Transfer Function on, SPFC, MultiScale Gradient Correction, BlurX, NoiseX, Screen Transfer Function off, Histogram Transformation, Curves Transformation, Cropping, and Geometry. That’s just my workflow, and yours might vary. It all depends on what you are comfortable with.

I think you will be pleased with the results of using PixInsight with your Seestar. My 25 minute image of IC 434 above convinced me.