There’s been some confusion about the meaning of the timestamp in the upper right corner of the Seestar app’s live-stacking screen.
For this discussion let’s assume you’re capturing 10-second exposures.
The Seestar evaluates each exposure, looking for stars it recognizes and making sure there are no star trails, airplanes, satellites, or other abnormalities. If it likes what it sees, it adds that exposure to the finished image. Technically, this is called “live stacking”. Seestar calls it “enhancing”. As each exposure is added to the finished image, 10 seconds are added to the time in the upper right. This is called “integration time” — it’s exposure time multiplied by the number of exposures.
There is a pause of about 1.5 seconds between exposures, so you won’t get 6 10-second exposures per minute of clock time. It’s also the case that the Seestar seems to not even try to accept every image it shoots — more like 1 every 3 at times. I haven’t figured out the pattern for this.
I’ve found if I have ideal conditions (including targeting an object whose path across the sky gives me minimal field rotation in 10 seconds), I get around 4 minutes of images for 5 minutes of clock time. But that’s ideal. Normal for me under Bortle 1 sky (very dark, high-quality seeing) is about 1.5-2 minutes of integration time per 5 minutes of clock time. So in an hour I might get 25 minutes of integration time. Over the course of 6-8 hours, as an object traverses the entire sky — including crossing the meridian at high altitude where there is a lot of field rotation — I’ll get anywhere from 1-2 hours of integration time.
I just processed 2 projects that each had 11 nights of data. The first had about 72 hours of total clock time and about 7 hours and 40 minutes of integration time. The other was the same 11 nights but only about 24 hours of total clock time. It’s path was “flatter” across the sky during those hours. In that case I got over 11 hours of integration time.
These are my experiences and might be dependent on conditions where I am and on my particular Seestar. It might also depend on whether I’m doing a mosaic or not (that is, framing is set to something other than 1.0).