Image directly from the Seestar S50 - no postprocessing (yet).
There were 1839 stars detected and measured in this image. The bright star right next to the nebula blew out and saturated. All I can state is that it must be brighter than 7.6 mag. This image has a statistical limit (5σ) of 16.4 mag, just 0.2 mag shy of the theoretical noise-free limit.
The theoretical noise-free statistical limit arises from the combination of the little telescope's limited aperture, and the seeing conditions and sky brightness at my Bortle 6.5 observing site
(my backyard above, and overlooking, Tucson to the South). The only way to do better than this fundamental limit is to (A) get a darker site with better seeing (< 6 arcsec over 10s), and (B) get a bigger aperture.
I think the Seestar S50 system is an incredibly good system for its price. No doubt some PixInsight post processing on the stack will make a much prettier image. But you can't complain about this image, given how easily it was acquired.
See also,
https://github.com/dbmcclain/AperturePhotometry
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