Thank you very much Rob! 
Macro photography for sure helped me to become more patient 
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In the early '90s I used to load up about 200lbs. of astrophoto gear, drive out to the same location as these shots, stay up all night waiting for a particular object, image for 1-3 hours on slide film…it would take the entire winter season to fill up a 24 shot roll. Then to get it processed to see what you may or usually may not have…
Fast forward to 2023/2024. A $500 all in one portable scope/imager made by Seestar produces images like this with very little effort. Wifi connected and controlled from the comfort of indoors. Crazy technology advancement.
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any post image editing?
Oh yeah. With astrophotography it’s almost a requirement. It’s much more data collection than imagery. All of the deep sky objects, not the Moon, are stacks of dozens or hundreds, even many thousands of frames to improve the signal-noise ratio. The Seestar does its own stacking and presents a result but also saves the ‘raw’ files so that one can use much more sophisticated PC software with numerous algorithms for noise reduction, et al. The craft has radically advanced since the old slide film days.
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That is impressive. Shots 1 and 3 are my personal faves. 
can you watch an object gain detail on a mobile device while it’s stacking? my dad is thinking about one of these, but he’s not a computer guy and not really into astrophography (though maybe I’ll be surprised), but, if you see the DSO in more clarity over a bit of time, that may be enough for him.
personally I think he should get what I want to get…a SW AZ-GTi with a small / light scope. with it’s max capacity at 11lbs and the mount / tripod weight being a hair over 10lbs, you could have a 20lb astropack’n’go. yeh, it will take a bit more effort to set up alignment, but being AZ, no polar alignment…so eazy peazy. heck, I thnk they have stuff you can buy that will do all that automatically for you so you ca be as lazy as you want, LoL!
Yes, you can watch in real-time as the stacks add up and the image appears more and more clear. It does require dark skies, of course. The Seestar S50 is as automatic as one wants. Set it down, power it on, it will prompt if it requires leveling (included mini carbon tripod) and is then ready to ‘go-to’ objects. All done with app on phone via either direct Wifi or it can join existing Wifi for communications and data transfer.
To get serious about imaging one needs to use an equatorial mount. Alt-Az simply cannot deal with the rotation of the Earth and thus the image time is restricted to ~10 seconds thus the need to stack images. With EQ mount the image time can be the limit of the background light. The most impressive images you see on the web are often many hours of acquisition time, still stacked, over multiple nights. The Seestar is a great entry point and will likely be plenty for the vast majority of those interested. There is open source software to enable it to operate in EQ mode but its designers didn’t plan for nor support it.
ZWO makes many great tools. The Seestar is trickle down from their far more advanced products and likely a ‘hobby project’ internally or a sophisticated plan to get more people hooked on the hobby and sell more equipment over time.
For me a primary goal was size and weight as I travel with it. It comes shipped in a durable foam case that contains everything needed to image, including a solar filter.
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