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Old 28-11-2011, 06:53 PM
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gregbradley
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gregbradley is offline
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Sydney
Posts: 17,877
I can only comment on CCDsoft as I have been using that for a few years.

It is an all round good program but its been neglected for several years and is now looking a bit old fashioned.

It works, its fairly easy to use, it is somewhat user friendly and intuitive.
Its even better if you use a PME mount as it integrates nicely with that and the Sky 6.0.

I find the autodark subtract feature in autoguiders does not work well (perhaps it is my settings but it does a poor job for some unknown reason), it is limited to 4 filter preprogrammed imaging. So if you want to do a HaLRGB then you have to do the Ha by itself.

It does not recognise hardly any cameras except SBIG unless you pay for a $100 plug in program which is incomplete and does not have all cameras (at least last I checked). It does not allow you to access some of the features of FLI cameras such as ghost image control, user defined download speeds, dew controller on the ccd window.

It does not exhibit autoguiding graphs, allow you to dither, remove hot pixels, average guide stars for guiding.

Maxim does all the above. Some have had trouble with it when doing T-point models assuming you wanted to do that.

So yes Maxim is normally recommended and I am about to switch over for the extra functionality but CCDsoft is free with SBIG cameras so that is a major plus.

It also allows direct guiding with your PME should you ever get one. That means no need for a guide cable. Its supposed to be better than guiding with a cable as well (I can't verify that but I do like it). Perhaps Maxim lets you do Direct Drive, I haven't checked.

And of course Maxim is US$499!!

That's 499 reasons why CCDsoft is awesome!

Greg
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