CCD Ciel?

[garymck]

Hi,

wondering if anyone has any experience using CCD Ciel for imaging?:

https://www.ap-i.net/ccdciel/en/start

I currently use SG Pro, but find prone to locking up - particularly when plate solving. Wondering if CCD Ciel works well......

cheers
Gary

[Bart]

My brother is using CCD Ciel quite successfully with Plate Solve 2. He likes it very much.

What plate solver are you using with SGP? I am using both Pinpoint and Plate Solve 2 with no issues. SGP has Plate Solve 2 built in, you only need to download the catalogues.

[garymck]

Hi,
If I'm doing a blind solve, I use Astrometry.net. None of the others (I've tried them all) does a blind solve at all or take so long as to be impractical to use. Once a blind solve has synced the scope, I switch to using Platesolve 2 and it works very well. My issue is that if you cancel a blind solve (ore any other type of solve, on occassions, the program will effectively hang and continue to apparently platesolve indefinitely - sometimes it times out and you can continue (perhaps taking 10 minutes to do so). If it doesn't time out - or you don't want to wait,l you have to kill SGP and completely restart everything.

Gary

[Benjamin]

Just had the same problem trying to quit a plate solve after the mount failed and ended up pointing the scope in a rather different part of the sky (the mount didn’t fail but rather it couldn’t drawn enough juice from my battery). I couldn’t get plate solving to quit in SGP at all so restarted Windows. I assumed it was because I was running it all in Virtualbox on my Mac but perhaps not? As a Mac person ignorant of Windows (aside from Astro apps) is there a force quit command that can work? I ended up restarting everything at least twice - mount, PHD, etc. it doesn’t take too long but then it is annoying that this one process can’t just end when you want it to.

[Bart]

You can try Control, Alt, Delete buttons all at once and open task manager. From there you can select applications and end task. Works most of the time.

Have you guys tried to get an answer from the SGP forum re the hang problems?

[Benjamin]

I just posted a Q in the main sequence forum about this :-) I think control alt delete does something else in Virtualbox but should be able to create a link to task manager to make it easy enough :thumbsup:

[garymck]

I've never bothered with the SGP forums. The issue happens most (not all) times when you cancel a plate solve. The issue happened with version 2, and still does with version 3.

I've decided to try Kstars for Windows. Given a choice I'd use Kstars/Ekos under Linux - it is absolutely brilliant, but Sitech doesn't yet have an Indi driver, so I'm stuck with the MS product. If that is an issue (and it may be as you need to use an intermediary program to load the Ascom drivers), I'll try CCD Ciel... It looks very full featured, and like Kstars, it is free!

cheers
gary