Photometry with a Seestar

[Melvyn Joslin]

Hello Robin. Thank you for guiding me to the asvso forum on the Seestar and its ability to provide photometry at the push of a button. It looks and is an amazing piece of kit but as yet does not provide the accuracy that is needed to compete with the standards that scientific data of the AAVS, and BAA variable star section require, as yet. So I will not be making a purchase. I have now decided to carry on with my visual photometry but on brighter objects and leave all the faint ones for Gary.

[Robin Leadbeater]

There is still much untapped potential here I suspect. Scanning the AAVSO forum a bit, it seems there is a lot going on in this area eg a fully automated robotic observatory pipeline being developed to generate photometry to AAVSO/BAA standards using a Seestar 30Pro, running on a Raspberry Pi
https://github.com/edjuh/seevar?tab=readme-ov-file

If ZWO see it worthwhile to provide some photometry functionality integrated into their products,(even if it still needs some development) then perhaps there might be enough interest generated to tempt them into offering a more science orientated hardware option. These scopes already have the ability to select internal filters, and swapping out a colour sensor for a mono one would not be a big issue, and I see the Draco, Dwarflabs latest offering in this market now also has active cooling.

Cheers
Robin

[Jeremy Shears]

I am also hopeful that we shall see progress by the smart scope companies in producing easy to use photometry pipelines. But the key will be that they must make the methodology behind the pipeline available to all to scrutinise. At present, people are having to do trial and error experiments to understand what the ZWO software (in this case) is doing. And in doing so, stumble across basic issues like saturated star images.

And great to hear you plan to continue with the visual observing, Mel! As Andy Wilson noted, the number of VSS photometric observers is holding up well, but there is a slow decline in the number of visual observers in the mix. IThe continuity of the historical visual record is itself a scientific resource.

[Author]

Posts