Quote:
Originally Posted by Enrique
I have been using EqAlign since they published the version 2 beta. The release version 2.0.3 is the one I am using now. The program has an English version but I use the Spanish one. There is documentation in Spanish and French; I have not seen one in English yet.
I use the program mainly for Polar Alignment. I do not have an observatory and every time I want to take pictures, I have to follow the polar alignment routine.
I do not think the Ascom drivers are a requirement because I do not use them. I use the LX200 native commands.
The program support QHY5 that is my guiding camera. It also supports any camera with WDM that means it will work with almost all webcams (it recognises and works with the embedded webcam that my laptop has and I tested the program with an old quickcam I have and it worked ok).
There is something that could be a bug in the program: when the program is measuring the angle of the camera, it does not stop the motors for the LX200 as it says it is doing it. I have to stops the motors manually. This trick is very simple to do and works quite well.
Something else I had troubles with was the inversion of the declination axis. Sometimes it is required and sometimes it is not. I do not understand why. It could be a bug for the southern hemisphere. As a result, in some instances I make the correction in the wrong direction. It is not big deal because I always do twice the alignment for each axis. If I did the correction in the wrong direction, the program shows me the error very quickly, in a minute, and I just reverse what I did.
My last polar alignment was done at f10 (fl=3000 mm). It took me about 25 minutes to do it. Then I fired up Guidemaster for guiding. The guiding was incredible, I had the target window in a size of 5 arc seconds and the guiding star barely moved. Guidemaster was sending very few commands to the telescope.
One advantage that I see is with this program is that there are plenty of adequate stars to select when doing the polar alignment. They do not need to be close to the horizon. Look here (in English) http://eqalign.net/e_eqalign.html.
My intension is to keep working with EqAlign. My next step is to work with PEC, then the guiding and planning features.
I believe the program is quite interesting. I have not sent my comments to the programmers yet, I plan to do it after I play with the other features.
Regards,
Enrique
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Sounds like you are really giving this program a good shakedown Enrique. Perhaps you should send in your experiences with it as looking at the english version in that link it is taylored for northern hemisphere