Thanks Euripides, great to hear you have used it successfully. Main background of my post was to gather experiences from users that are actually using KStars for robotic imaging. Do people use it that way, and if so, what do they like and what would they like to see different. As I will setup a rig in a remote hosting observatory, should I keep using KStars, or better looking for an alternative?

Some areas of concern that I would have right now are:

Reliability. How often did you experience interruptions, due to failed autofocus routines, crashes of a driver, or the whole app, updates, etc. In my current non-remote setting, all these happen from time to time, but as I’m usually following what’s happening, I can often quickly correct and move on. But in the planned robotic setting, I may not look at it for a couple of days, so if something goes wrong on day 1, that would be a lot of imaging time lost.

Robotic scheduling. What is your experience with the scheduler? How well does it work in ‘robotic’ mode, so run startup activities lets say an hour before dawn, switching equipment on using dragonfly, start imaging at Astronomical night, image from a list of targets, figuring out priority based on visibility, moon distance, distance around meridian, % completion, manually set importance, etc., and switch equipment back off in the morning and go to sleep until the following evening. I am not a programmer, so writing scripts would not be an option for me.

Are you still operating remotely? And still with KStars?

Many thanks for your thoughts.

Willem Jan.

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