Hi,

I'm a newcomer in terms of astrophotography. I really love the Kstars and INDI's comprehensive feature sets, and want to dig deep into this topic.

My current hardware set is as shown as follow:

• Mount: EQMod Mount
• Telescope CCD: QHY
• Guider CCD: QHY
• Focuser: ZWO ASI
• INDI running on Raspberry PI 3B+

The problem is that I live in city, where there is tons of light pollution, so I want to move my equipment to my friend's backyard in the countryside. Therefore, network delay has become the major blocker for me.

After checking source code in Kstars, it appears that Ekos is heavily embedded in Kstars, for operation like guiding or focusing, FITS image taken by PI has to be transferred back to my desktop (at home) first, then sending commands back to INDI on PI after analyzing FITS image.

From my current test outcome, FITS image from guider scope is fine to be transferred, as its sizeis 1028x960. It's relatively small. But FITS from telescope CCD is over 50MB (6024x4024). Waiting for this image coming back is a nightmare, but I still need to use this image for focusing adjustment.

Is there any suggestion available for this kind of setup?

Here are some of my idea:
1. Running Kstars on PI totally, and connect to PI using VNC (does not really want to go that way, as my PI will crash when I open large FITS).
2. Is there any way to decouple Ekos from Kstars and make it run as server in PI, while Kstars server as a client?

Welcome Jason to INDI forum. You can run Ekos on a PC, connect the the RPI4 (get RPI4 4GB at least, RPI3 is really not suitable for this). You can set capture to be REMOTE so the images are not transferred back to Ekos on your PC, except for focusing for example (but this can be subframed).

Is this something where INDIhub might help?

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. I will order a RPI4 to test your recommendation. Will come back to this post after testing my equipment in a remote environment.

Didn't thought about that. Thank you for advice. Will dig in for testing