Hi All,
Sorry for the lengthy post but I couldn't resist. I was so impressed with Kstars and Ekos I had to write about it
First of all many thanks for the great job you’ve done with Kstars and Ekos. I didn’t expect it to work so well. I managed to get all my devices working during the first session and almost got to serious imaging. There were some small problems on the way though.
Kstars crashes a lot when zooming and pointing map to found targets. However it might be “fixed” by Jasem here:
lists.kde.org/?l=kstars-devel&m=138807351307331&w=2
Just tried that and similar fix applied also to asteroidscomponent.cpp solves the zoom problem.
Ekos is a modal window. On my small screen it almost completely covers the kstars map. When I try to minimize the ekos window, kstars also gets minimized, so I can’t use the map. That is pretty annoying
It happened a few times that I closed INDI configuration panel and I wasn’t able to reopen it from Ekos. I’m not really sure when it happens. Also when closing Ekos and Kstars, indiserver is not stopped automatically. One needs to remember about that or subsequent attempt to run INDI in ekos will fail (to connect to devices).
Guiding didn’t work for me. I wasn’t able to go through calibration. The error message I got was that the mount didn’t go back to the initial position in DEC axis. I remember I had pretty big backlash in DEC axis. PHD was able to cope with that. That is a pity that ekos can’t (so I have to finally fix it). Anyway, there is one question I didn’t find answer for when reading the: do I need to align the guider with the mount? I mean that the edges of the image are aligned with star motion when moving mount in RA/DEC.
After attempting to guide and calibrate the guider, EQMOD stopped working. I wasn’t able to slew the scope to new target. Restarting INDI usually helped, but it happened once that neither restarting INDI nor restarting kstars helped. I even tried disconnecting EQDIR. Only laptop restart helped resolving the problem.
Plate solving worked well. However there is one annoying feature. Every time I start EQMOD I have to fill in the scope and guider aperture and focal length. I wasn’t able to save these values between restarts.
Autofocus didn’t work at first but the camera was totally out of focus. After coarse manual focus I used auto-focus and it worked pretty well (didn’t try to cross check with mask though).
CCD (capture) module wasn’t used a lot. I only took preview pictures because of the missing guiding. There was one annoying bit though. I had 2 cameras defined: main and guide. Every time I started ekos, guide cam appeared in the CCD module and Align module. This was tricky as plate solving didn’t work at first. Only after a moment I realized that I was using guide cam instead of main cam for Align.
To sum up, I was very happy to go that far during first full session. I wasn't able to image under Linux before because of lack of Atik drivers. Now the drivers are there and kstars with ekos seem to be pretty good for astrophotography. There are some problems, but not that major.
Cheers,
milosz