Seestar S50 Tips and Tricks

Here are some of the things I've learned in using a ZWO Seestar S50 for about a year now:

1. Turn off the compass calibration in the app. You don't need it. It takes time, and the system will simply compensate for it after it takes the first couple of images doing a "horizontal calibration."
2. Get it to join your home wifi network so you can set it up and go inside and be warm while using your tablet or phone to tell it to do stuff.
3. Plan your targets with Stellarium on your desktop instead of the built-in sky atlas. You can move around more easily and if you set up your camera settings in Stellarium properly, you can mimic the Seestar field of view to accurately see what you will get with the Seestar.
4. Put it on an equitoral mount, aim it at Polaris, tell it to sync to Polaris, let it calibrate, and then tell it to go the target you want. This will 100% remove any field rotation and it is an officially supported method by ZWO
5. As mentioned in the article get the the open source seestar_run companion application. This will let you schedule multiple object over the night, calculate mosaics to compensate for the poor field of view of the Seestar, and more. It will require a bit of minor programming skills, but there are guides for how to do that work.
6. Find the RTSP field for your Seestar and watch from VLC on a big monitor. This will currently only work for planetary or terrestrial viewing, but it's much easier to watch the Moon or the Sun on a 32" monitor than a 3" phone.

Have fun!!