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I was using the trial of CCDCommander for a while, on a number of spare astro netbooks and laptops until I finally forked out the money for it. In the meantime, I had considered buying ACP (I already own PinPoint).
But, since moving back from Queensland and no longer having an observatory, coupled with the fact that anything north of the celestial equator is hidden by our house meant I'd save myself some serious dollars.
So, for now, CCDCommander fits the bill.
I think the only thing that I really needed to use my brain for was to set the east and west mount limits (in minutes). But, after I found an explanatory post on the CCDCommander Yahoo! Groups group, it clarified it for me.
My eastern limit on the Gemini is 105 while my western limit is 100.
105-90=15 degrees. 15/15 (degrees per hour) = 1 hour = 60 minutes
100-90=10 degrees. 10/15 (degrees per hour) = 0.67 hours = 40 minutes.
Once those values are input, CCDCommander takes care of any meridian flips required.
It truly is a joy to watch it do its thing. My next purchase, after a Paramount is going to be the AAG Cloud Watcher system, to automate weather-related events (AAG, amongst others, interface with CCDCommander).
H
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