Welcome to SeeStar-Py’s Documentation!
Danger
Firmware 7.18+ requires authentication.
Yet again, ZWO is trying to alienate the astro-tinkerer community.
The reason a lot of us chose the Seestars over the competitor smart-telescopes was due to the ability to be able to access and control the seestars in ways that ZWO does not offer via their own software. This “open-source” feature was one of the Seestar’s greatest USPs and, if embraced properly, would allow the Seestar user community to leverage their endless creativity to come up with project beyond the wildest imagination of the corporate heads at ZWO.
Alas, ZWO’s greed is shutting down this effort before it really had a chance to grow, turning what could have been a real game-changer smart-telescope into just another piece of consumer electronics that will be surpassed by other superior products.
If your Seestar is running firmware 7.18 or later, seestarpy will not
be able to connect without a key file. The feature/firmware-auth
branch now ships a built-in extractor: obtain the official ZWO Seestar
Android APK yourself (e.g. from an APK mirror) and run:
python -m seestarpy.extract_pem /path/to/Seestar_v3.1.2.apk
The key is written to ~/.seestarpy/seestar.pem where seestarpy
auto-discovers it on every connection. See Authentication (Firmware 7.18+)
for the full setup and the legal basis for interoperability.
seestarpy is a Python SDK for controlling ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescopes over your local network. It wraps the Seestar’s JSON-RPC command interface and binary image streaming protocol into a clean Python API — no phone app required.
Installation
pip install seestarpy
Getting started
The shortest path from install to imaging:
import seestarpy as ssp
# 1. Connect — the Seestar is auto-discovered via mDNS
ssp.connection.test_connection()
# 2. Open the arm
ssp.open()
# 3. Goto a target (coordinates resolved automatically)
ssp.goto_target("M42")
# 4. Start stacking
ssp.start_stack()
That’s it — the Seestar will slew to M42, plate-solve, and begin stacking sub-exposures.
If auto-discovery doesn’t find your Seestar, set the IP manually:
ssp.connection.DEFAULT_IP = "192.168.1.246"
You can find your Seestar’s IP in the official phone app under the station-mode settings.
Controlling multiple Seestars
Most commands accept an ips keyword to broadcast to multiple
Seestars at once:
# Discover all Seestars on the network
ssp.connection.find_available_ips(n_ip=3)
# Open all arms simultaneously
ssp.open(ips="all")
# Goto the same target on all Seestars
ssp.goto_target("M42", ips="all")
See the Connecting to your Seestar page for more details.
When you’re done
ssp.stop_view()
ssp.close()
Contents
Tutorials
Feedback
Found an issue or have a feature request? Open an issue on GitHub.