We all tried Smart Telescopes for the ECLIPSE!
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- Опубліковано 7 чер 2024
- Thanks to @GalacticHunter and @SarahMathsAstro for collaborating with me on this video! In this one, we share our thoughts and RESULTS from using smart telescopes to capture the Total Solar Eclipse on April 8th, 2024. Specifically we talk about the DWARF II, the Vaonis Hestia, and the ZWO Seestar S50.
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Contents
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0:00 Intro
0:28 DWARF II
1:22 Vaonis Hestia
4:35 ZWO Seestar S50
7:02 Tracking during totality
9:03 Would we use them for next eclipse?
Awesome! Great collaboration all!❤
Awesome guys! I had only the Dwarf 2 and it worked rather well, I could capture the prominences but not Bailey's beads. I liked how easy the filter was to take off and on.
In terms of tracking, I never even thought it used computer vision, I think it was just mechanical, old school like Goto altaz mounts
I was in Wapakoneta, Ohio for the eclipse and I had good success using my Canon60D with a 250mm lens riding an iOptron SkyGuider Pro. I found Nico's videos on the eclipse extremely helpful and constructed a filter per his instructions using the Baader solar film. I have also enjoyed Sarah's videos. I've only been doing astrophotography since January of 2022 and both of you have been a tremendous help to me. Thank you both for all you do and keep up the great work!
Used my S50. Stayed in Delaware and was able to get 86%. Clouds before, clouds after. Total blue sky for entire event. Cleared cache and emptied drive. Did time laps, singles and videos. Stayed with auto. Perfect tracking. Had to deal with a little wind. So much fun. Sold on smart. Waiting for S60 or S100 release.
Seestar pro next 2 months
@@dominickzaucha Did you hear that from ZWO?
Of course, now that everyone bought the S50 we'll buy the new one.
@mikehardy8247 who started this engineered obscelecence nonsense. I feel like there's way too many gadgets with targeted life spans
Beyond the planned process of chipping at our wallets, there's the eventual disposal of tech polluting everything. Whatever...
This was a very kool follow up. Unfortunately I wasn't in the path of totality.
I used a Tamron 150-600 with no mount on a 7D MKII. Internal intervelometor. Moving it as required. And a 70-200 mm f4 Tamron on a T7i. Mouned on a SW SA. The solar filter blew off. It was pointed at a bright sun for several minutes, while I searched for the filter. No damage to equipment. I contribute this to the sun being small in the frame?
Imaged with Seestsr, TL, which worked well, but drifted, at least on my phone screen. I think if I wouldn't have corrected, it still would have been fine. I say this because the resulting video seemed to self correct, jumping occasionally, but staying centerd.
Good Information and thanks for sharing.
I used the SeeStar as well, and I thought it performed really well without intervention. However, the tracking went a bit haywire around totality, with the algorithm seemingly having a hard time deciding what to center on. I left the filter on during totality so I could focus more on the moment and not struggle with removing it. Overall, it performed amazingly well.
I purchased an Askar 103APO for the eclipse and deep sky astro, after watching Sarah’s review of it. I used it during the eclipse and was absolutely blown away by what I could see in the video an photos.
I also setup a live stream so my mom could watch remotely since she couldn't make it.
Photo bombed by a bird at 8:56 😂😂
Love this video - Heavy Hitters all together ! 😎
8:05 I actually like the extra drama provided by the violent shaking, it gives a better feel to just how epic the event is 😂
nice collab there...was curious to see what the filter for Dwarf looks like? is it just like seestar one?
You guys are great... thank you for sharing. I was shooting once/minute. Timelapse from stills is pretty easy in PS. But... What method have you found is best for aligning the images first? Thank you!
Avengers assemble!
😂 Now we need Astrobackyard to join the fight
@@calabraiswell uhh, he also imaged the eclipse
Four of my favorite telescope people. The technology seems to be moving forward...
I used the Seestar S50 with a 1 second timelapse, but I didn't remove the filter at totality. The thing I loved about it was it was mostly fire and forget.
I had to adjust the exposures manually in the deeper partial phases, but that was it. The telescope drifted a bit during totality (since it couldn't "see" anything), but at the end of totality, it re-centered pretty rapidly.
Some viewers shared a short interval timelapse and video of totality with me, and they were similar to Nico's. They were both great, and the video really captured the Baily's Beads phase very well.
I will definitely be bringing a smart telescope of some sort with me on future solar eclipses.
I used my Seestar and got an awesome video during totality. I was in upper state Vermont
I saw the eclipse in Waco after flying from the UK and joining a British tour. It looked doubtful about 5 minutes before totality but it cleared just before second contact.
I used the Fujifilm X-S20 with the 70-300mm lens and a 1.4X teleconverter that was mounted on an AZ-GTI mount that had been converted to an equatorial mount. The mount was roughly polar aligned by levelling the mount and using a real magnetic compass with magnetic declination tables. The alignment turned out to be surprisingly accurate and the eclipse was in the frame all the time. An intervalometer was used to control the camera, but I made a mistake with the interval setting and took the images about every second and it filled up the 64GB card, but I had spares.
Afterwards we went to New Mexico and Arizona and I managed to take a very clear handheld photograph of the Moon from the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff. It was at a elevation of around 2,200m and the clear sky certainly helped to give a good image.
I was at my sons apartment in Perrysburg Ohio for the eclipse and we used the Hestia and Seestar. Had thin cloud cover but was able to get some incredible shots. My son was able to take a video with the Hestia from c2 to c3 and get the baileys beads and diamond ring. I actually came up with custom filters for the ease of taking on and off for both of these scopes and they worked really well.
Interesting.
Saraaaah 👋🤗
Hi Guys , Thank you, I am glad you could get good photos and time lapse with your Smart scopes.
I carried a Seestar S50 to Mazatlan , Mexico from the UK. It was easy to transport a had no problem with airline security. It had taken great pictures of the sun at home in England. Eclipse day was a huge disappointment.
Just would not connect to the Wifi , the digital compass failed and it was a wasted effort. It was too late to try it manually and I did the next best thing, put it aside and enjoy the visuals.
I should have carried a DSLR and used that instead. I did not factor in poor internet connectivity. Also ( maybe) steel in the hotel construction ( were on the roof top of Holiday Inn) may have interfered with the telescope digital compass?.? We live and learn !
Saw a brilliant Eclipse C1 through to C4 and a great 4 min 17 sec totality.
Wishing you all Clear Skies 😊
Srinath
I took a Hestia and a Vespera to Kerrville, TX and hoped the clouds would part. Both were very difficult to initialize with only glimpses of the sun when the clouds allowed. The solar finder on the Hestia is very small so a really bright image is needed for easy locating. The Vespera seems to need full sun to establish location and tracking but managed on my 6th attempt.
The Hestia was on a Benro Polaris for tracking so I could take some photos each time the clouds parted, would not have been possible without a tracker. Miraculously, they opened up for the first 20sec of totality so I did get some shots of that. The Gravity app for Hestia would be greatly improved if they enabled a bluetooth remote shutter or allowed programmed automatic shutter timing.
The Vespera jpegs were unusable. Initial images of the partial were ok but somehow only dark images were captured from about midway between C1 and C2 to the end. Unclear if it lost tracking due to clouds but clearly doesn't meet the needs unless there are clear skies.
I also used the seestar for our partial here in the Denver area. I don't know if I got lucky, but when using the dew shield /hood (from Luke) with the standard seestar solar filter it fits about perfect Goldilocks fit!
I don't have that much experience with the seestar so I was more or less saving manually then trying out the video feature and the time lapse feature along with using the auto focus and exposure controls. Basically just using the eclipse time for familiarizing in the daylight since it's was only a 65%eclipse. I was impressed with the seestar s50 capabilities! Yeah it lacks some features but for what you pay, it's incredible! Later that night I got pics of m191, the pinwheel galaxy and was further impressed by the ease. I literally did nothing more than plop it on the picnic table, leveled it and shot away! Perfect gotos and more resolution than I thought possible for such a low $$$ 'toy' (No, it's not a toy! I was able to capture SN 2024ggi in NGC 3621 the next week from the peak of my roof!) Great fun! /Dave 👍
Ease of removal of solar filter while ensuring a good snap on to the scope is key. Better still if the filter comes of by itself seconds before totality, it would ensure no shake. I envision future designs to have preprogrammed exposure settings for eclipses.
I also used the Seestar, just for the ease of use and letting me do my own viewing at the same time. I tried messing with my 80mm doublet and I could just captured the whole thing with it, but I had focusing issues that I couldn't figure out, so I just stuck with the seestar to make images and time lapse videos.
I would have liked to have seen the Vaonis Vespera included in your review. I used a Vaonis Vespera Passengers edition for the eclipse and had issues with tracking. About 10 minutes prior to totality a large cloud bank obstructed the sun, and my Vespera was unable to track. I had to reset the device, and because the sun was so dim at that point, it took a long time for it to find the sun and it was not ready in time for totality so I had to resort to my mirrorless camera and 600 mm lens.
My S50 did a great job. Used video mode and captured about 8 minutes worth. Tracking during totality was a bit flaky.
I was at the Indianapolis event at the White River Park. My son and I used a Seestar and recorded a timelapse. We screenshot a still photo of the prominences immediately after totality and submitted the photo the university photo competition. We won first place! We're waiting to see when they release the story on their website.
I was 15 minutes north of you. We drove up to Magog, QC to be along the centerline of totality.
I used my Seestar in Vermont and was quite impressed with it during the eclipse. I also experienced the same overexposed issue when the sun became smaller and crescent like. Overall, I think it did a great job!
I brought a Dwarf 2 with me to Maine for the total eclipse. Was really excited as I have used it for a lot of deep sky objects and it has performed wonderfully. Unfortunately, where we went in Maine, another 1000 people had the same idea. This meant there were 100's of cell phones and wireless devices sending signals that completely messed up my Dwarf 2's wireless connection. It kept disconnecting and I had to keep my ipad 3 inches from it to maintain a wireless signal. If it did disconnect it took a miracle for it to reconnect to my Ipad. I think others were having similar issues as I connected to a couple other smart telescopes there without even trying. This probably created problems for the smart scope users. I never had an issue like this at my home, but I have limited wireless competition there. Hopefully I will figure out a way to avoid this in the future as I was not extremely fimiliar with the Dwarf 2 at the time and may have been making a Newbie mistake. Anyway, it did ruin some of my eclipse moments as I had to leave my group, get as far away as possible from people and stress out about reconnecting and making manual adjustments to catch a one in a lifetime experience. It did provide nice images but will take a lot of editing to adjust for the lack of tracking when I lost connection. I do love the size and ease of the smart scopes and really love setting in my living room, playing my guitar as my Ipad shows me, unseen, deep sky objects in sub zero weather where my Dwarf bravely resides.
I tried using the SeeStar S50 in Austin, TX. We were supposed to go up to Lampasas, TX, but the night before I checked the weather reports and it looked like the clouds up there would be as bad or worse than we were going to have in Austin, so I decided to stay home. During the event, it was so cloudy that my SeeStar kept losing tracking of the Sun, so I got a few short video clips of the partial both before and after totality, but couldn’t get anything on the SeeStar during totality. During totality, I had to take what snapshots I could on my iPhone, and that gave me only one or two semi-decent pictures. All in all, I was pretty disappointed.
I used my SeeStar that I brought to Ohio. I am new to all of this. My SeeStar film was fantastic. I also had a little hiccup with the solar filter at totality, but can’t complain. I got an 8 minute video.
Used my SeeStar and took video from start to finish and totality. All in auto settings and it tracked perfectly even as it was getting vibrations form the deck as had 100 people in a roof top. It split the video into two segments. For some reason at 120 minutes it stopped recording. I had to hit record button again to finish.
if i travel for one, i'll be using my pentax dslr's again. built in intervalometer makes time lapse photo's crazy easy. its what i did for this eclipse in fact. tracking mount and my dslr clicking away.
I traveled up to Ohio from Virginia to see the totality and brought my S50 with me. I noticed about 15-30 mins before totality that the seestar was wiggling in its tracking and would actually lose the sun. Once I turned off the 'higher precision tracking' option on the screen it seemed to do a lot better. Was able to take a video from a few mins before to about a min after totality completely without intervention on my part (minus the filter) so I could enjoy the event myself. Have the whole video on my channel for any interested, you can see scrolling through it it was slowly losing having it centered but it did really well.
Very nice!
I was using a seestar and two cameras. I knew the seestar's fov was very tight so in practice, the s50 was my 3rd priority. I shot a video on it of c2/totality/c3, but never adjusted the exposure manually during totality so my corona shots were blown out.
The much bigger problem I had over the entire event was that my Solar Eclipse Timer app wasn't giving me audible notifications/announcements. I was getting notifications from it in the notification shade area, but no sound. I had tested all of this previously and it worked fine. I believe that the fact that I was controlling my seestar from the same phone may have been what was interfering with the audible alerts. Quite disappointing. I still got some great shots, but I was kinda caught off guard at both c2 and c3 due to this failure.
Yep, the solar eclipse timer app needs to be on a dedicated phone with the app open to work flawlessly. I did warn about this in one of my eclipse prep videos, but even I was a bit scattered since I was trying to control the DWARF and Seestar and keep the announcements going for the whole group. It was probably the most challenging part. Wish I had remembered to bring a third phone :)
I'm in Europe so we couldn't see the eclipse unfortunately, but I'm wondering about the Dwarf II. Did you set it up in photo mode and then use sun tracking? After that is set up, go to timelapse and the sun should've stayed in the middle. I'll try a time lapse whenever the sun dares to show it's face again :) But I'm sure it will stay reasonably in the same place. There are app that can make your videos less shaky. Would love to see a video with those videos. Thanks for the comparison after show 👍
Yep, I think in the new version of the app, they may have moved a few things around, but that sounds right. Photo mode -> features -> sun tracking
I drove to Texas with a bunch of gear but it was quite cloudy and rain was forecast so I only used my SeeStat S50. I also had concerns about the tight fit of the solar filter but I had found an STL model online and 3D printed a little solar alignment tool that also held the filter. This had a much looser fit to the scope but the filter held in the 3d printed finder snugly. This made it easy to remove when the time was right. The clouds were an issue for me and I was also having some random tracking issues at times. I guess that is understandable. I did 1 minute Timelapse intervals up to totality and then went to 10 seconds for totality. About a minute after totality ended the clouds covered it for good. The Timelapse was so short out of the box that I took all the individual images and put them into iMovie of all things to create this: ua-cam.com/video/oXjSgLVc0qE/v-deo.htmlsi=cAwlLN3LQudYA24j
I used Seestar with 30s timelapse. I was in Arizona for about 75% so I didn't remove the filter. tracking was great until after full eclipse. as the moon passed the sun, tracking changed to the moon (rather than sun) and caused the crescent sun to slowly move out of field of view. would have preferred Seestar stay tracking the sun for a more polished image. overall, it did well
I used my own eyes at the eyepiece. I can watch TV at home.
I watched it with a 7x50 binocular with solar film and recorded it with my 102mm refractor on my iOptron AZ Pro using my camera on video.
I was in an area of 69%. Finally set my Seestar on 1 min time lapse. At first I didn’t try the time lapse then I went to every 30 seconds before settling on the 60 seconds. I thought it turned out decent but after watching this video, I went back and watched my time lapse and now understand and can see the over-exposure during the middle of the eclipse. Due to my inexperience, I originally thought maybe it was the occasional cloud.
I don’t think I’d like the Hestia after watching this video even though she seemed to have positive comments
I have a question for those that have more experience than me. Im wanting to take a detailed image of the sun. Correct me if I'm wrong, but to get the detail in the sun you need to use an h alpha filter correct? I don't have telescopes or ASTRO camera or anything like that. The equipment that I do have is a Canon r8 full frame sensor and a sigma 150-600mm lens. I believe it has a 105mm filter thread. So my question is, is a h alpha filter all I need, or do I stack that with a solar filter? Do I have to have an ASTRO modified dslr? Is it possible to get the detail out of the sun with this setup? Thank you for all your help in advance.
You can image the sun with a cheap white light solar filter and any telescope/lens/camera. This is the best option for starting out and what we were doing with the eclipse.
H-alpha solar imaging is not as simple as buying an Ha filter (you can’t use a deep sky Ha filter for solar imaging). It has to be one specifically designed for solar imaging like the Daystar Quark or a dedicated solar telescope. The cheapest option I’ve seen for Ha imaging of the sun is Sol’Ex - it’s a DIY 3d printed option with a diffraction grating and a slit. Best of luck and stay safe!
I sanded the edge of my filter so I could remove it with minimal effort.
What is your opinion on the ZWO Seestar S50 to do deep sky photography ?
I reviewed it for that here: ua-cam.com/video/VRLgbCKx6Xs/v-deo.html Overall: impressed for the price, some important limits at the moment are small field of view, and no rotation so creative framing is basically non-existent.
After watching yours and other reviews of this scope. I've placed an order incorrectly. I've ordered 503 102 bundle and don't think it includes the scope. I'm reaching out to reviewers as svbony aren't responding to my messages. Thanks if you can help with any means of contacting them.
I'm not sure what this is referring to, maybe a different video? There are no Svbony products mentioned in this one. All the Chinese manufacturers including Svbony are on a Chinese holiday right now (their Labor Day), but will be back on May 6th. Let me know if you still can't reach them later next week
Seestar wins hands down.
You two are very cute together.
update on gravity?
Gravity is the smartphone app that the Hestia uses. There was an update shortly before the eclipse with the Timelapse feature.
Ok hello
I was also in Newport Vermont with my Seestar. Here is a link to my Timelapse ua-cam.com/video/OFCGdHS8yHU/v-deo.html
hehe
Are manufacturers scared of adding extra aperture to smart telescope. What's stopping them from making a light bucket into smart telescope??? Why can't we have a bigger smart telescope which can produce rich, professional stacked pictures of DSO's
They are coming. Check out the new Celestron Origin for instance (6" aperture)
WTF Two top astrophotogrphers shilling these auto mounts. They are not adequate! A cheap AR90 and solar filter on a static alt az would have given better results!
Apples and Oranges Shaun. These are simply an option, and this isn't a review comparing them to traditional telescopes, just to one another as we were curious how they would work with the total solar eclipse since they weren't designed for that event in particular. If I were comparing to your proposed setup, I'm sure I'd have a lot to say, just as I did when comparing smart scopes to a star tracker and camera setup at similar price: ua-cam.com/video/VRLgbCKx6Xs/v-deo.html I am agnostic on new technologies, and will try anything that comes out. It's just a tool, and I talk about how the Seestar video of the Baily's Beads influenced my processing with a higher end setup here: ua-cam.com/video/QwPRtfHQPoQ/v-deo.html
I'm entitled to my opinion. I just kind of expected the top astronomy channels to use a suitable rig to image this rare event properly, and have it about the event, not an in depth review about some new kit.
@@shaunsprogress of course you are entitled to your opinion, but as mentioned in the video I did use other kits and talked about them extensively in other videos on the channel to help people prepare for this event however they wished. The two videos I made about smarts scopes and the eclipse were meant for people who use these devices.
Smart telescopes suck.
Like it or not, this is the future of astrophotography. It's just like the jump from film to digital, you can hang on.
AI driven capture and processing will be the way forward.