I am striving to greatly reduce, if not eliminate, my MS Windows installations in advance of October 2025. I really do not want to deal with Windows 11 and forcing it to accept my CPUs. I do not plan to buy 7 new computers to make Microsoft feel secure when Linux runs just fine on all of them. Yes, I have 8 computers today, plus 2 Raspberry Pis, and only 1 is Windows 11 "ready". It happens to be one of the slowest CPUs as well! I have managed to migrate all my non-astronomy computers to Linux without issue. I actually find Pix Insight quite a bit faster now!

I have a StarMaster which uses a rather old Sky Commander and Star Tracker hardware made by Sky Engineering. There is an ASCOM driver for this. It was developed by an individual, not a company. As I see it, I have two options.
1. Replace the Sky Engineering boxes with OnStep hardware. This seems quite doable, but far from trivial.
2. Figure out a way to "use" the ASCOM driver.

I will probably continue to run some favorite tools in Wine like SkyTools since I think I'm willing to give up that program being able to directly issue goto commands.

At this point I am gathering options so all crazy thoughts are welcome.

Mark

Read More...

I am using the Astroberry image and I have my EQ-G mount, Meade DSI camera and Rigel nStep working. My Canon T1i is not responding to "preview" requests in CCD Ceil. In playing around I can get the shutter to open and close by pressing the "PC" button in the "output" row of the "settings" tab and close again by clicking "Off" inside the INDI Settings panel. When I go into Debug mode I get a message to "Please update the CCD information in the Image Info section before proceeding" I tried putting my number in and pressing "Set" the numbers disappeared and I still cannot take a test shot. What am I missing? Is there s setup procedure I need to perform?

Read More...