[Doogs38 (Alex)]

Hi Steve. Mate, your ‘wall of text’ is anything but that - it’s a great description and I/we all learn from the experiences of others. So, keep ‘em coming.

For your flats issues, let’s see if we can help you resolve them as I reckon flats are important. +1 for what John said about the ZWO drivers making the necessary adjustment between 16 and 14/12 bits. I spent days reading how ppl numerically calculate the optimal flats ADU for their cams and I quickly gave up - way too many opinions. In Ekos, I just aim for something in my target ADU range (I think I’m using 25k atm) with a 5sec exposure and adjust the light source intensity to achieve that … my ASI294MC seems quite happy with that but a different camera might require something different. For the ASIAIR+, I work it out empirically via the on-screen histogram and adjust the light intensity to get a curve that sits roughly mid-range. This gives subdued grey/green colour flats that normally (just) show any dust bunnies. I’ve not had any problems calibrating images using these flats.

How are running Ekos? Do you have a RPi4 at your scope running Stellarmate or Astroberry, and connect remotely? I connect to an RPi4 (running Stellarmate) remotely from a Mac using KStars/Ekos and have only once experienced an issue that prevented files being saved to my Mac. It turned out to be a simple permissions issue, which was resolved (while I was fault finding) when MacOS asked me to allow Ekos to access my folders. Alex.