Seestar vs $7000 Rig - IMAGES in 4K

Welcome back to the head-to-head challenge. Some of the folks who looked at my head-to-head C-Star versus $7,000 rig video said, hey, I want to see this video in 4K so I can do some pixel peeping and do close-ups on those images. So that's what this is, a short video head-to-head to look at those images so you can really do some inspection. So, let's take a look at the head-to-head Before we start, the old question was, can a $1,000 telescope be a $7,000 rig? I've got the C-Star S50 Pro on the left, which is brand new, and you have my $7,000 rig on the right, which was assembled over the last 4 years. Lots of parts and pieces and cables and technology and very different. So, let's take a look at the images. These are the same images taken the same night, at the same location, Portal 6, suburban bad skies, light pollution filter, dual band, and so we try to keep everything the same. So, let's zoom in on the Eagle, and first you can see we've got some noise in the dark areas, but we have a nice bright image, a one-hour exposure, you see the head of the Eagle, you can see the wings, you get some detail that could be brought out later. Remember, these were not processed, other than just what the program, the live-stacking program gives you. And you can see, very importantly, the pillars of creation in the middle that are beautiful from other pillars. So, very nice one-hour image that you could process into something really, really, really nice. And the C-Star has also the shape of the Eagle, but not quite as bright, the signal of the noise is not as high. We still are getting the pillars, you can see them, that's great, and some other pillars, details over here, but the noise is a little bit higher, and the stars are a little bit bigger. Alright, next on the list is the Eastern Veil, and when this came up, I was really surprised how good the $7,000 rig did this in just an hour. That is a really nice shot of the Eastern Veil. I guess it does very well with the dual-band filter. In this case, it was the MVZ dual-band filter. We've got some great detail there, interesting little blue wisp there, amazing, I thought. And the C-Star, not quite as bright, stars are slightly bigger, but you are seeing some nice wispy details there with the C-Star. And now we can start to see that there is a difference here, and largely driven by resolution. On the right, you've got 26 megapixels. On the left, you have 4,000. So 26k versus 4k. You are going to see a big difference there. Alright, let's go into the North America. Go to the Cygnus Wall down here in Mexico. Very nice, very strong, you can see it, and even some good dark megalithic detail. We've got the spikiness along the coast of Mexico, good level of noise. We go over to the equivalent here on the C-Star. Very good capture of the Cygnus Wall. The spikiness is good, but we do have a little bit more green noise here, so we have that going on. Next, Andromeda Galaxy, beautiful hour-and-a-half image. So after an hour-and-a-half, you're starting to get some good dust plane. Look at all the dust plane detail that can be brought out very well in post-processing and any of the different software you can use. Also, starting to get some of these starbursts, the blue star regions there. And it's all resolved into little dots. You do not see those little dots over here, because we simply don't have the resolution. We have about 1-sixth the resolution across these two. So it's pretty amazing that the C-Star with 1-sixth the resolution does so well. But you can see the cloud and the dust bands doing very well there, so a very nice image for the Andromeda for being 1-sixth the resolution. And lastly, we really went crazy with the Dumbbell one-hour exposure, and I really zoomed in, and you can really see the blue bow-tie outer shell from the Dumbbell Nebula, the start of the red axe you may have seen in long exposures. And so you can really get a great image of this if you combine what we've got here with a shorter exposure, which you can layer in the center and get all that good detail inside the cloud. Going over to the C-Star, also very good. A little bit less on the blue bow-tie on the outside. Don't quite have the red bar as much, but still very good, and you could do the post-processing and add in a shorter exposure on the C-Star as well. So in total, very good, and despite having 160 resolution, the C-Star holds up and compares pretty well throughout the whole night. So again, I have to conclude there's no clear winner. We have a $1,000 Pure Joy instrument here that just works. We set it up and it just works fantastic versus the $7,000 rig, which is definitely more powerful, definitely higher resolution. But we're going to be doing more post-processing work, especially with the radiance. Light pollution radiance. But yeah, they're two different tools perhaps for two different jobs. The job that really wins for the C-Star is anything that involves crap. You don't want to be setting up and taking down a high-bid rig even though it's not that big. The C-Star is wonderful as well. So thank you very much for that, and later I'll do a video on the C-Star under dark, dark, dark sky. And that's the way to do it. With that.