I love the fact that we have so much available at our disposal now to make this kind of thing possible. The old days of manual steering to keep the object center over the course of multiple nights just to get a single image can now be done in a single night with equipment that fits in the back of an SUV. Much thanks to people that build tools like this and PHD!<p>My retirement dream is to do this all the time. I fall prone to the traditional amateur astronomer's delima of having free time available to go to a dark sky location and the weather is bad, or be totally slammed with gorgeous viewing conditions.
Looks well thought out and powerful to use.<p>The page does, however, fall prey to a common issue among HN submissions:<p>For someone who is not already an expert, <i>and</i> who does not know the rest of the pieces required: what do they need to know/have to get their first successful use?<p>I’m vaguely guessing that someone needs a camera that can keep the shutter open, some type of servos to turn the camera?, and a laptop running next to it all night (which implies you also need necessary cables, extra battery power, and waterproof bags just in case)?
I would love a viable F/OSS alternative to SGPro, as it’s pretty much the only show in town when it comes to fire and forget capture sessions, and I’m too busy in the day to stay up all night nursing telescopes - I rely on it handling everything from focus to acquisition to guiding to some control, including exceptions such as weather - and will therefore do my best to find the time to contribute to this project.
This looks pretty cool. Anyone have any experience with it? Used to use Backyard EOS to control my canon for timed exposures.<p>Edit: In case anyone is interested here’s a couple images I took with my 9.5 inch scope. The globular cluster required stacking many exposures. The double star is not color enhanced or anything, that’s how it looks through the eye piece.<p><a href="https://astrob.in/257816/0/" rel="nofollow">https://astrob.in/257816/0/</a><p><a href="https://astrob.in/257435/0/" rel="nofollow">https://astrob.in/257435/0/</a><p><a href="https://astrob.in/256165/0/" rel="nofollow">https://astrob.in/256165/0/</a>