Milky Way Shootout - Seestar vs. Full Rig

On this side, I have the Sea Star S30 Pro smart [music] telescope. And on this side, I have a traditional Milky Way rig. I tested these head-to-head on a single night when I was visiting northern New Mexico to see how they each worked for capturing the Milky Way. And in this video, I'll share my experience [music] and results. So, the first contender in this shootout is the ZWOCR S30 Pro, which is a $700 smart telescope, where the Milky Way is just one of many different astronomical objects that it can capture. I also want to point out that while the results you'll see in this video were taken with the S30 Pro, the new S50 Pro has the exact same wide field camera system for Milky Way capturing. So, everything that I'll be saying about the S30 Pro also applies to the new S50 Pro. The second contender in this shootout is a more traditional Milky Way rig based around the Move Shoot Move Nomad Star Tracker. And I think Move Shoot Move, you know, was already taking over the Milky Way star tracker space with their first Star Tracker, the Move Shoot Move rotator. But with the Nomad, they are now the solid leader. Uh, this tracker is exceptional. It's really, really well done. Um, they sell lots of thoughtful accessories to make a full kit around it. Mine is outfitted with their equatorial wedge here and their green laser pointer that screws onto the back. In addition to the Move Shoot Move Nomad, this kit uses a Peak Design travel tripod. Uh, there's lots of travel tripods out there. I just have this one. This tripod packs down so small that it's just always the one that I'm bringing on any trip where I'm flying like I did to New Mexico. And I also got their universal head adapter for this tripod. So, I'm not using the default head. Um, instead, the Move Shoot Move system is basically the new tripod head. And for pointing on top of the Move Shoot Move Nomad, I'm just using a random ball head that I had lying around. Uh, Moo Shoot Move sells a really good ball head if you don't already have one, but I already had so many that I didn't need another one. And then for the camera, I'm using a Canon EOS RA here. Really, any DSLR or mirrorless camera can work. Modded isn't really necessary. That's more of an advanced kind of thing when it comes to Milky Way shooting. A full-frame sensor on the camera is nice to have for nightcapes, but it's not required by any means. It just opens up your field of view a bit, but there's other ways to change your field of view. Uh, for instance, if I was working with a crop sensor camera, I might go for a wider lens to get a wider field of view. Like this lens I'm using here is 28 mm. It's one of my favorite Milky Way lenses, but if I was with a crop sensor, I might go 14 mm. Unfortunately, this lens is discontinued. It's the Sigma 28mm f1.4 Art for EF mount. Since this is an RF camera, I am using an EF to RF mount adapter in order to mount the lens onto the camera. Normally, I would also use a lens warmer with this kit. In the northeast US, that's a necessity to prevent the lens from fogging up. But in New Mexico, where I shot this, uh, shootout, uh, the air was so dry that I didn't feel it necessary. The last piece in this kit, um, in the case of the Canon RA, is just a simple shutter release. Your camera might have something built in to take many pictures. This one doesn't. So, other than a full intervvelometer, I find myself just reaching for this more often. I like the simplicity of it. It's just mechanical, so I don't have to worry about batteries. I just put the camera in continuous shooting mode and then just lock this switch and the camera just keeps taking pictures until I stop it. [music] So to capture the Milky Way with the Pro Sea Star models, we're going to start by turning on the smart telescope, connecting in the app, and the next thing I usually do is tap this button that says open arm. That just brings up the telescope arm so that the two cameras can see the world. From there, we can enter the dedicated Milky Way mode. And if the sea star isn't already pointing towards the Milky Way, you can use just the onscreen joystick control in the app to turn the sea star uh both left, right, up, down until it's facing the right direction for your Milky Way shot. So, let's now go through the different options we have here in Milky Way shooting in the Sea Star app. These have actually been improved upon since I did this shootout in New Mexico. So, the Sea Star would actually do better today in this head-to-head. Uh, but that's how it goes with this kind of stuff. The software development often moves faster than I can keep up with making these videos. I always have a bunch of videos uh going at once. And so, in any case, I'm going to be showing you the current options here in the app as of August 2026. Even though I didn't have all these freeze ground options back in April when I started this video. Okay, so the first one here is live view format JPEG or RAW. I've always kept this on raw. Uh, the second one is enhance EXP. This is how long each subex expposure or sub in the Milky Way stack will be. So your overall Milky Way picture is going to be made up of many shorter exposures and this is how long those are. In EQ mode, you could go to a max of 60 seconds. In alt as which is what I recommend for Milky Way shooting, I tried 20 and 30 seconds, found 20 seconds was the sweet spot. It's long enough that I was getting good SNR, but at 30 seconds I was getting some rotational star trailing effects, especially in the corners. So, I would stick in alt as stick to 20 seconds. As long as your tripod is level, you're going to get a natural straight foreground automatically, which makes this freeze ground foreground feature super useful. In EQ mode, your foreground will almost certainly be tilted and not really usable. You'd have to take another exposure for the foreground. Now, as I mentioned, uh, when I was testing this months ago in New Mexico, the app didn't yet have all these options for how long to expose on the foreground. I think it would just take one 20 second exposure or one 60-cond, whatever sub timing you were using, but now it will take many subexposures for the foreground and stack them together to reduce noise with the tracking off. And so, this is really great. I'd recommend at least 5 minutes or if you have the patience, even 10 minutes. I usually turn this save each frame on just in case I want to stack things myself or something goes wrong. But in that case, if you stack them yourself, you'll lose the freeze foreground feature. So, generally I'm finding that I'm stacking the I'm using the stacked image that the sea star creates and not stacking the Milky Way subs myself. Anti-do is something I turn on at home in New England, but it's likely not necessary if you have a very dry environment like New Mexico. And then we have four options down here. Capture is your main Milky Way uh mode. That's uh what I'll be showing in this video. Star trails is going to create a single star trails image. And to get nice long trails, you're going to want to leave that going for at least a couple hours minimum. Probably like 4 hours would be even better. Time-lapse is for creating a video of the night sky rather than a still image. So you can sort of see how the Milky Way moves across the sky. And then finally, this little icon is for making panoramic images of the Milky Way. And it does all the stitching and everything right in the app. There's a few different options. It's pretty cool. It does work. But again, in this test, I'm just going to be using the standard Milky Way mode, which is capture, the one that it opens up on. After I have all these settings in, I'll just autofocus and then tap the red button down here to start the sequence. And I'm letting it capture for about 20 minutes. Um, as it's going to, you know, live stack as it goes. And so, you're going to see the Milky Way get more and more defined on screen. That can be a lot of fun just to sort of watch it uh develop. So, now let's turn to capture [music] using the more traditional Milky Way rig. To put this together, we're going to screw the Move Shoot Move wedge onto the tripod. So, it has a standard 3/8 in uh stud on the tripod. And then from there, we can just uh put the Move Shoot Move Nomad right into the wedge. It has a little foot built on the back. I think this is Arca-Swiss. Um, and then to attach the ball head to the Nomad, we just unscrew this red retaining ring and then attach the ball head to this black piece with the built-in screw. And then it reattaches to the Nomad again with the big red retaining ring. And this system for attaching the ball head, I think, is really great. I much prefer it to just an exposed stud. On the Nomad, there are several different ways to polar align, from smartphone alignment to regular Polar Scope. Here, I'm using the green laser. I know that uh many of you have are live in countries where the green lasers aren't legal or you live in the southern hemisphere in which case the green laser doesn't work because there's no bright star at your celestial pole. So in that case you're going to have to use like the smartphone method which I've tested and does work well. But if you can use the green laser I find it even faster to polar align with the green laser. You just turn on the laser and then use the controls on the wedge until the green laser beam aligns with Polaris, the North Star. Um, so you have the altitude adjustment in the front and these azimuth pushpull adjustments in the back. Once you have uh it polar aligned, it's important that you don't bump the tripod or kick it accidentally uh because then you it will mess up your polar alignment. You'd have to repolar align. But once polar aligned, you can just aim the camera and lens here at the Milky Way using your ball head adjustment. So in terms of camera settings, I'd suggest a little experimentation on most cameras. ISO600, 3200. That's a good place for ISO. For the lens aperture, if you have a f1.4 lens, you could likely stop it down to f2, f2.2, something like that to get sharper results. If you have an f2.8 lens, I'd probably just shoot it wide open and not stop down. And then to determine the shutter speed, what I'd suggest is start at 20 or 30 seconds, take a test shot, and then go to playback mode and press the info button or on Nikon just the down button until you see a histogram display. And what you're looking for here is some separation from the left edge of the graph. So the peak should be up to around a quarter to a half over from the left. You know, somewhere in there. You just don't want to expose to the right. You also don't want it squashed up against the left hand side. Okay. And when it comes to focus, with some new mirrorless cameras and lenses, we can just autofocus on the stars, just pressing the shutter down halfway like we normally would. And then after you've autofocused, you could just switch it to manual focus, uh, so that it stays in, you know, that focus position, but doesn't have to rea every time. With lots of cameras and lenses, autofocus is not going to work. So, you'll manually focus. And the goal is just to make the stars as small as possible. But the other thing that you'll see is that when you get into focus, a lot of small stars will sort of pop into view. Well, when you're out of focus, all those small stars disappear. Um, you can always check focus in playback mode, too. I would recommend that because on most cameras, you can actually zoom in even further in playback mode. And that should really make it clear if you're in focus or not. Okay. And once we have all the settings dialed in and focus all set, we can then just turn on continuous shooting mode on the camera, lock the shutter release to start taking a sequence of 20 second pictures. And if you haven't already, make sure the star tracker is turned on to your uh hemisphere, north or south. And just like with the sea star, about 20 to 30 minutes is usually plenty for getting a good Milky Way stack. Last thing with this rig is after we're done taking our photos of the Milky Way with the tracking on, we want to turn off tracking on the Nomad and take a separate photo of the foreground. And here I often slightly reposition the aiming of the lens so that I can get more foreground. But the important thing is just to make sure that the horizon is level, that you have some sky in the picture because we're going to use that for blending later. But you can try to get more foreground by slightly re-iming a camera here, uh, if you want. And for the foreground photo from a dark sky site, um, you're going to need a long exposure. I usually do 2 minutes at ISO 800 or 4 minutes, ISO 400, even 8 minutes, ISO 200, something like that. And the reason we want a long exposure is to let in enough light to get the overall signal away from the noise floor of the camera. So again, we don't want it pushed up against that left edge in the histogram. to learn astrophotography. 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You can upgrade to premium to unlock all courses. And right now, Nebula Photos viewers can actually save 20% off an annual subscription at brilliant.org/nebulafos. So, we're going to start here looking at images with a single 20 second exposure from the Sea Star S30 Pro on the left and the traditional rig with the Canon RA on the right. As you can see, it's quite evident that the traditional rig with the bigger lens and the bigger sensor and everything picks up a lot more light even if the field of view wasn't bigger, which it is. Um, it's a lot there's a lot more signal in the Milky Way, but then it becomes even more apparent if we zoom in that you can see there's a lot of little stars in the full-frame traditional rig picture and far fewer stars, more just sort of noise in the single frame from the sea star. But we are already picking up in a 20- second exposure lots of nice detail on the dark dust lanes in the Milky Way. and some of these little star clusters and the nebula. But if we compare that to the full-frame result, you can see uh the details even a little bit better in the single exposure. So now let's look at what happens if we stack 20 minutes of these exposures. And I would say the traditional rig just from this um quick first glance looks very similar to the single exposure while the sea star um result um got a bigger glow up I think from the stack. Um but if we zoom in, yeah, I still agree with that. We're seeing a lot more small stars more clearly defined now in the stack from the sea star. Well, the stack uh unprocessed stack from uh the Canon, it it looks pretty similar to the single exposure, I got to say. Uh so we we already got a lot of signal in the signal single exposure with the Canon. With the sea star, it really sort of needed that 20 minutes uh to build up the the signal to noise ratio sufficiently that we get a a cleaner picture with more fine stars. Okay. And then the last image comparison here. This was my attempt to process the two pictures uh from each setup to the best of my ability. Uh, I brought in the foreground here in the traditional rig and, um, cropped them somewhat similarly and, you know, saturated them and did all the sort of processing that I would I would normally do on a Milky Way picture. Um, and I think, you know, they end up pretty similar. Um, but some definite differences other than field of view. I mean, um, we're getting a bit more here with the 28 millimeter, but I've I've explained, you know, if I was really trying to match these, I would have used a 35 millimeter and then they'd be a little bit, uh, closer. In terms of color, I think I tried to make them as similar as I could. Um, but we're it was I think it was hard to get the sea star image quite as as bright and and sort of uh as as the traditional rig without bringing out too much noise. So, let's let's zoom in a little bit here and see what we can see on a zoom in. Because the sea star sensor is is open to the Halpha, it's it's like a modded sensor. It's open to um Halpha light that these red nebula like the cat's paw and war in peace um do pop out pretty well in the stacked processed version. Here's the lagoon nebula up here. The dark nebula structures are a little bit muddy. Um like this is called the dark horse feature here and it's it's not quite as well defined as I'd like. Um and then the stars are also not like super super sharp. Um, and if we look at the lens on the Sea Star, it it's just a very it's like a cell phone kind of lens. So, that's that's sort of to be expected that we don't get like super super sharp stars, but I am pretty pleased by how many little stars we're seeing in this uh stacked result. And then the foreground, I'm not really even going to talk about much because uh like I said, it didn't have the full freeze foreground features yet when I took this picture. So, this is just one 202 foreground shot. it would look a lot better uh today now that we have like a 10-minute option. Okay. And then here is the result from the full traditional rig. And when we zoom in on this processed version, um we can really see that the stars make a big much bigger impact in this one. and and they're nice and sharp and colorful uh compared to the sea star where I did my best to try to bring out the stars, but they just are always a little bit dull and blurry and not as colorful as we can get with uh a bigger lens and bigger sensor here. So, I I do like the ability to really sort of bring out the stars and see all these blue stars in the in the star clusters and things. I mean that's that's really nice up here. The Sagittarius star cloud and um like I said the the dark nebula are looking a little bit um better defined over here in the row of fuki that's coming out a bit better just because of the better uh light gathering ability of of those bigger pixels, bigger sensor and bigger lens. So that's uh the analysis from a zoomed out view. They look more similar. When you zoom in, you start seeing a lot more differences between the two images. I want to briefly address cost. Cost isn't really the point of this shootout at all. It's more just to give you an idea of how each setup works and the image quality you can expect. But just to be completist about all this, the cost of the Sea Star S30 Pro is currently $6.99. Alternatively, the S50 Pro, which has a bigger telephoto lens, but is exactly the same in terms of the Milky Way, is currently on pre-order sale for $8.99, but in a few weeks, that price will go up to $9.99. A couple of the items in my traditional rig here are discontinued, like the Canon RA and the Sigma 28. Um, but just going off average used prices, the total rig, as I put it together here, is about $4,000. Now, that said, many photographers already have some kind of DSLR or mirrorless camera. They might already have a suitable lens. They probably already have a tripod. So, it's completely possible that all you actually will need as a photographer is just the Move Shoot Move kit, which is very reasonable. About 330 bucks for the Nomad and Wedge and laser. So, it really depends on what you already have in terms of what you would price this out at. But in just raw numbers, yes, I am comparing a smart telescope that retails for 700 uh versus 4,000 for the traditional Milky Way photography rig. So, my final thoughts are that while the Milky Way mode on the Sea Star isn't the main attraction, I think it's more of a nice to have in addition to the main features which are deep sky. It's definitely suitable for beginner Milky Way shooting, especially from a dark site. It captures some pretty nice detail. you can definitely bring out some color as well if you're shooting um you know under a dark enough sky. I've also been impressed that the freeze foreground feature, even though I wasn't fully able to show it off here, has gotten significantly better since I started working on this video with the traditional rig. Yes, there is slightly more complexity, more parts to put together, but the Move Shoot Move Nomad is about as stripped down a star tracker as possible, making it pretty simple. And I think that's exactly what Milky Way imagers really want. Something small and solid that just works but gets out of the way. Easy to set up, easy to pull our line. That's what the Nomad is. I've also used the Nomad at 85 mm to capture comets, the large melonic cloud, other stuff. I was super impressed by actually the tracking ability at 85 as well. So the Nomad isn't just Milky Way. You can do some deep sky with it. The Nomad is increasingly something I I don't go to a dark sky without. It's just so small to bring along that I there's no reason not to bring it. And then it when I do use it, it's just really easy to set up and it works really great. Hopefully this shootout was helpful. If you're interested in how I processed these final Milky Way images, that is actually the bonus video this month for my Patreon members [music] and you're now seeing all of their names on screen. Um, anytime that I have a video that's over 20 [music] minutes long, I do these end credits with the names of everyone who supports me and this channel over on patreon.com/nebulafos. [music] And as mentioned, for all Patreon members from $1 a month and up, I do a bonus video every month. I do also do a community Zoom call every month where you can ask [music] questions. I do um extra channels and a a monthly challenge on [music] my Discord server. So, that can be a lot of fun. There's there's a lot of other stuff going on on the Discord [music] server as well. So, if you like what you see on the YouTube channel, consider joining on Patreon. Um, it [music] starts at just $1 per month and there's tiers for more benefits and the link to check it out is in the description or you can just type in patreon.com/nebulafos. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver. Clear skies.