First set of successful pictures with the ekos/indi on the RPI 3b+. Taken from my balcony in Berlin, close to the airport with ~19 mag skies. It was a first night getting like 20 minutes of useful pictures (super hot, a bit dusty and without proper polar alignment) and a second one getting almost 2 hours while I was sleeping, much colder, clearer and with a much better polar alignment.

OTA: Redcat 51
Mount: AZ GTi.
Guiding: no guiding because of the silly broken frames issue on the ASI120mm
Camera: 6D (modified)
Filter: optolong l-enhance

180s subs, unfortunately the proper darks and flats were taken with different image dimensions (because of ekos getting confused with the real full 6D resolution and the nominal one that dcraw reads, the issue is documented in one recent thread), so I recycled old 120s darks and old flats.

Still pretty nice despite the issues.

Great work. How do you find the AZ-GTI mount? Can you park it however you like?

I am happy with the mount, it holds 180s subs decently at 250s, the gotos are accurate, it is really quiet while tracking and not very noisy while slewing and the android app works decently, allowing even to polar align it. But ...

- I haven't tried to guide it yet because of the silly broken frames with the asi120mm. The asi 120mm mini should arrive at the end of the month, crossed fingers. If it works well I may wven push the mount in the future with a 70-85mm petzval.
- SW is apparently not super consistent with them, and while one unit may have a nice periodic error /backlash values, the next might be much worse (mine seems to be quite decent).
- the wifi interface now seems to be working better after I upgraded the rpi power supply. But until now I had a crazy amount of issues.
- and well, it doesn't stop being a az-alt mount adapted to work in eq mode. The capacity is not huge, it lacks a polar scope, maybe it has some play here and there (particularly the connection to the tripod could be a bit better.

If you are thinking on it for your nice pico obsy, I am not sure it is the best candidate (maybe some ioptron or the eqm35 mounts would be more solid), although I bought it with the idea of maybe one day doing something in that direction and super compact as well. Just need better skies than Berlin ones, maybe in Spain .

Thanks for an honest review of it, over on the CloudyNight forum they all rave about this mount. I nearly bought it for my second remote observatory (which is being postponed).

And that picture you took there from Berlin, stunning.

Well, the mount has very mixed reviews in Cloudynights. But don't get me wrong, I think the mount even for astrophotography has an outstanding design and I wouldn't hesitate to buy it again (although I would have chosen the package with the mak127 to also do some visual . If you get a decent unit is like having a Star Adventurer on steroids for almost the same price and the same weight/volume. Of course, if it would have targetted the astrophotography community there would be things to improve a bit, like more consistency in the backlash and some little details like a better clamp. But its price would have skyrocketed for sure. And anyway, my unit is pretty good, the backlash is not very noticeable visually and the gotos leave me the objects pretty well centered.

I would really love to see how hackable it is in the long run, how tunable it is to reduce the backlash in those units that need it (or even how possible it would be to convert it to a belt driven system) and what other crazy ideas people come up with.

Here's the monster thread about it www.cloudynights.com/topic/586532-new-sk...gti-goto-wifi-mount/ some people talk about fine tuning, new saddle etc...

Wow... great image!
I just received and tried the L-Enhance filter. Wow. My exposure time (Bortle 9 skies) went from 30-90 sec to 360 sec but the result was just... wow. No light pollution. No trillions of stars. Just the nebula.

Totally. I still need the new guider to arrive, until then I'm basically stuck with underexposed 180s ISO2500 subs.