A new toy!
We went on a cycling trip in the Northumberland region of the UK last month. We followed the path of Hadrian’s Wall for four days on the bikes. It was an excellent, but challenging, ride. Here’s (more or less) the route we took, with elevation profile:
We added some miles to that, for example deviating north to Bowness across the firth from Scotland before our second-night stop in Carlisle, marked as “B” on the map.
The spot marked “C” is a tiny little village called Once Brewed, with a surprisingly good local brewery and restaurant and a handful of bed-and-breakfast inns. It’s on the southern edge of the Northumberland National Park, which is a Dark Sky park — no artificial lights to interfere with the majesty of the cosmos. We timed our arrival for the new moon so we could do some stargazing. I was excited to get there!
Alas, Northumberland is often socked in with clouds, and that was the case for the two nights we spent there. Besides that, we were awfully far north, just a month off the summer solstice, so the sky didn’t really get fully dark at all — sunset was at 9:30pm or so for our stay, and sunrise at about 4am. The sky was bright enough all night long to wash out less-bright objects in the sky.
So stargazing was a bust.
My brother-in-law had planned ahead, though, and had arranged for a local astronomer to meet and talk to us about astronomy. That was super interesting! He was able to share photographs he’d taken from the site on clear nights and talk to us about astronomy and science generally.
He showed us a really amazing little device that they use for stargazing sessions with visitors on clear nights. It’s called a Seestar. It’s a little telescope with two motors for azimuth and altitude control, tilt and compass sensors, a high-end digital camera and a pretty beefy processor for controlling all of that. He just raved about it.
Of course I bought one when I got home!
I’m in southwest Missouri right now, on Table Rock Lake, and brought my Seestar S50 along to play with. Nights are warm and skies are clear, so I figured this would be a good time to get to know my new toy.
The Seestar connects to your mobile phone for control and image display. It’s pretty great! You can use the telescope to capture long-exposure images of galaxies, stars of particular interest, and more. You can look at them on your phone and upload them to the cloud or your computer. The Seestar’s motors will track an object for as long as you ask it to. This kind of stuff used to be unavailable to the astronomy hobbyist; now, I’ve got that kind of observatory for about five hundred bucks, plus the cost of my phone.
The official user’s manual is poor, but there are lots of passionate fans of the device out there. I found an excellent manual by Tom Harnish, edited by Murray and Gloria Foster, on the unofficial Seestar wiki. It got me up and working quickly. Love me some nerds on the internet!
It turns out that your excellent sky-watching scope is also a pretty effective low-profile surveillance device. You can put it it “Scenery Mode” and aim it at whatever you like. Here’s a storage building about a mile away from me, across the lake:
While I was looking at it, I could see a boat that was about to enter the frame, so captured six seconds of video:
There’s a dock just to the left of that storage building, on the shoreline. I aimed the camera at that. You can see there are two speedboats up on lifts in the slips, one an outboard, one an inboard. There’s a swim platform on the right, with the ladder in the water.
You could leave the Seestar powered up and catching timelapse photos of any of that scenery. As I said, a pretty good surveillance tool in the daytime, when you’re not using it to look at the sky.
It’s got a bunch of programming for in-the-solar-system observation. I used that to get a late-morning shot of the sun. I just set it up on the shoreline, leveled the tripod as well as I could, and pushed the “find the sun” button in the app. A little bit of whirring from the motors and I had it nicely framed:
You can see several sunspots in that image, around the horizontal center line and just right of the vertical center line. If you zoom in you can see even more!
That image was made through the custom solar filter that comes with the device. The unofficial user manual warns you sternly that aiming it at the sun without that filter will turn your Seestar into a very expensive paperweight. The app reminds you to put the filter on too, before it will locate the sun for you.
A couple of nights ago, before I had read the unofficial user manual, my niece and I took the device outside late in the evening to mess with it. Despite my ignorance and a confusing user interface, we managed to get a nice four-minute exposure of the star Alniyat (Sigma Scorpii) in the constellation Scorpius. She’s a pretty savvy astronomer and helped me figure out where the interesting night sky features were.
Here’s what that looked like:
That bright spot in the center of the picture is Alniyat. But the really interesting thing about that photo is the density of stars in the field. There are way more than we could see with the naked eye! The Seestar uses its excellent camera, and successive exposures, to create “stacked” images that include objects too faint to see unaided.
Edited to add: I just noticed that there are two satellite tracks in that image, one from the edge at about the seven o’clock position to five o’clock, and the other from about three o’clock to 6:30 or so. Satellite pollution is real!
This is a really neat device. It’s a powerful telescope and camera that puts advanced stargazing within the reach of novices and amateurs at a surprisingly low price. It’s much loved in the community for its ability to do deep-sky observation, looking at distant galaxies and other objects. That’s my next task!
Now that I have some clue what I’m doing, I look forward to playing with it more and getting some good pictures. I’ll share them here when I do.
