I am amazed at all the observatories, and remote setups in this thread.
My setup is very simple in comparison, but INDI/Ekos make life much easier.
What I do NOT have:
- Autoguiding: my mount has no autoguiding port, and I don't want the weight and complexity (yet).
- Motorized focusing: I focus manually at the beginning of the night.
Mount: Celestron CG5 with the GotoNova 8400 Upgrade Kit, and 8401 hand controller.
Optical Tube: Celestron C8 with Starbright XLT, with F/6.3 Focal Reducer Corrector (1085 mm focal length)
Camera: Canon EOS 650D, with 2 inch adapter
Focuser: JMI EV2 2 inch focuser (it adds to the optical train length hence focal length is not 1280 mm). This is not strictly necessary, but it came with the scope package, and allows 2 inch accessories to be used.
All this is controlled from an old laptop (now a 2009 Toshiba Satellite A300, with Core 2 Duo), 8GB or RAM, and an SSD disk. The laptop has Xubuntu (XFCE) 16.04.3, with KStars and INDI from Jasem's PPA for daily builds.
The laptop connects to the home network by WiFi, and I use NoMachine to login to it and run KStars/Ekos from inside.
The battery pack was used for the mount only before I got a 110V AC to 12v DC adapter, and now everything is on regular house power using an extension cord.
Since I don't have autoguiding, I am limited to 30 seconds of exposure. I don't do stacking or postprocessing for many reasons, and the 30 second exposures are acceptable for now.
My workflow shuns eyepieces and visual work completely. Even focusing is done on the DSLR's LCD from LiveView at the start of the evening. I setup everything, do a rough polar align using the built-in polar scope, balance the scope, wait for something to focus on, then go inside and commandeer the scope from there. Plate Solving alignment is magic, and the killer feature for this setup. I then point the scope to targets and take one exposure to check everything is good, then create a sequence of 5 or so pictures, and let it roll, then move to the next target.
The tedious part is setting up and removal of equipment every night.