Seestar S50 Pro live from a balcony in Rzeszów

It's a free live view from my Seestar S50 Pro telescope on a balcony in Rzeszów, Poland. During a session you see the current image of the sky getting more detailed with every frame, tonight's plan, a sky map with the telescope's field of view and a gallery of earlier images.

When the sky is clear and dark - usually from astronomical dusk to dawn. The next session is announced on the main page in place of the image. In daytime, under clouds or in rain the telescope rests and you can browse the gallery.

Most likely it's daytime, the sky is cloudy or the telescope is getting ready for the next target (slewing, focusing, first frame). The first image of a new target usually appears after a few minutes.

No - it's my private telescope and I plan the sessions myself. You can, however, move the Seestar frame around the sky map and see what would fit in it. If you have a target in mind, leave a note in the guestbook.

Yes, the live view is free and ad-free. If you'd like to support it, you can buy me a coffee - it helps me buy new accessories and build new features.

The images are mine. For private use - enjoy them and share the link to the site. If you'd like to use an image in a publication, presentation or online, contact me through the form on astronocnik.pl.

It's a smart telescope by ZWO: a 50 mm lens, camera, mount, focuser, filter and computer in one body. You control it from a phone app - it finds targets on its own, focuses and stacks images live.

Yes, it's one of the easiest ways to start astrophotography. No polar alignment, no star hopping and no processing software - the first results show up within minutes. The limits are the small aperture and short focal length, so small galaxies and planets come out small.

Bright nebulae, large galaxies and star clusters work best. The Seestar also takes images and videos of the Moon and the Sun (with a proper solar filter). Planets are visible, but only as small discs - a longer focal length telescope is better for them.

The outline of a bright target appears within minutes. A good image of a nebula from a city usually takes 1-3 hours of total exposure, and faint targets need several nights. You can watch this live - the slider shows how the image improved with every frame.

By default the Seestar works in alt-azimuth mode and the sky slowly rotates in the frame, which limits the length of a single exposure. In equatorial mode the telescope is tilted along Earth's axis, so the field doesn't rotate and you can expose longer - up to 60 seconds per frame in my setup.

The built-in light pollution (LP) filter works great for emission nebulae. Narrowband filters cut the city glow even more, but need longer exposures. Galaxies and clusters are better shot without a narrowband filter, because they shine across a wide range of colours.

No, the Seestar has autofocus. With big temperature changes during the night it's worth refocusing, because the optics shift slightly as they cool.

Yes - on humid nights the lens can fog up within tens of minutes. A dew shield and a lens heater help. The Seestar has a built-in heater, and I also control it during the session.

You can - this website proves it. City glow brightens the background and lowers contrast, but a smart telescope, a light pollution filter and longer total exposure make up for a lot. Faint galaxies are the hardest, bright nebulae and clusters the easiest.

A 9-step scale of night sky brightness: 1 is a perfectly dark sky far from cities, 9 is a big city centre. My balcony in Rzeszów is about 7, a suburban-to-urban sky - only brighter stars are visible and the Milky Way can't be seen with the naked eye.

Yes, especially around full Moon - it brightens the whole sky much like city glow. Tonight's plan shows each target's distance from the Moon. With a bright Moon I pick emission nebulae and a filter, and leave galaxies for darker nights.

Because Earth orbits the Sun and at night we face a different part of space. Summer and autumn belong to Cygnus, Lyra and Andromeda, winter to Orion and Taurus, spring to the galaxies in Virgo and Ursa Major. The chart in tonight's plan shows how high each target is at any hour.

Only automatically and lightly: these are raw stacks, stretched and with the background glow removed (DBE). The images are not edited by hand, retouched or enhanced with AI (AI is used only in Hikari's stories). This is the material a final image is made from.

A single frame from a city collects little light from the target and a lot of noise. As frames add up, the noise averages out and the faint signal of the nebula adds up. That's why the image gets cleaner and more detailed every minute.

DBE (Dynamic Background Extraction) removes the background gradient - the uneven glow from street lamps, city light and the Moon. The software models the sky background alone and subtracts it, so the target stands out and the corners aren't brighter than the centre.

They let you tweak the image your own way: brightness, contrast, colour saturation and black point. Only you see the changes, so you can't break anything for anyone. The "Reset" button goes back to the original settings.

They're viewers' reactions to the image from a given night. No login needed, and reactions from the live view move to the gallery together with the image. They show me which targets people like most.

It is generated live in your browser - there is no audio file. Several loops play single, soft notes from one scale, each at its own rhythm, so the pattern never repeats exactly (an idea known from Brian Eno's album "Music for Airports"). From the current image the page measures brightness, colour and contrast and gently changes the pitch, density and brightness of the notes. The music starts only after you click the note icon and you can always turn it off.

Hikari (Japanese for "light") is the narrator of this website - a character who reads short night stories during the live feed while I sleep. She is a fictional character, not a real person.

Yes. The stories are prepared with AI assistance, based on my notes and facts from the project, and read by an AI voice that we created specially for Hikari. The player shows an "AI" badge - hover or tap it for the full information.

The story is available while the live feed is switched on - also shortly before a session starts, while the telescope waits for its first frame. An icon of a star with sound waves then appears above the image - tap it to start. Nothing plays by itself, you can scrub and skip 10 seconds back or forward, and the background music fades down while Hikari speaks. If you accept statistics, the page anonymously counts how far you listened (no IP address), so I know whether the stories are interesting. Plain clicks on Hikari and her archive are counted for everyone, but only as numbers: no IP address, no cookies and no identifier.

Each new story is open to everyone only on its premiere night, during the live feed. At noon the next day it moves to Hikari's archive - the entrance is in the gallery, just below the "Straight from the telescope" note. The archive is my gift to people who have supported the project with a coffee. It is not for sale - I send the code personally, as a thank-you. Anyone can see the list of stories.