Chris,

I've been using StellarMate for the last couple of years.

My experience is that it works marvelously during cloudless nights. For instance, last night I took over 180 subs between two targets with almost no skipped captures.

However, I continue to struggle with intermediate clouds appearing through the night. What usually happens is that guiding eventually aborts (which is fine), then capture aborts. What happens next seems to be almost random... sometimes guiding will begin again, then capture, etc. Most times guiding begins, and capture doesn't start up again. Rarely, it kicks it back to the scheduler and restarts the job... which I really wish it would. It's forced me into being a "fair weather astronomer".

So, I feel your pain. I don't know if other products (NINA, SGP, ASIAir, etc.) have these issues... perhaps others will chime in. I've invested a lot of time and effort into SM and really like the functionality. I've expressed my opinion before that I would prefer that they focus on this issue as a priority rather than adding more features/functions. Like you, I don't mind in restarting the schedule when there is an issue of any kind. It takes just a few minutes to restart, slew, focus, align and restart guiding/capturing. IMHO, this is an area that needs less finesse and increased simple logic.

I look forward to other's comments.

Ron

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