Quote:
Originally Posted by frolinmod
Thanks for the update Greg. Good stuff. You have a small TheSky6 to TheSkyX transition learning curve to overcome. You'll get over that hump shortly.
Yes I am getting there. Its not that hard really and a lot of it is the same so it was more the initial way the sky was being displayed that was odd. But its a lot easier to adjust.
I thought you can adjust the horizon. I did it last night. Perhaps you are referring to some aspect of that.
Well, I for one would not expect SB to add support for new mounts to old obsolete versions of their software from years gone by. The Paramount MX comes with TheSkyX. Unless you've been running TheSky6 as a prior Software Bisque user from years back (as a few of us here have), you wouldn't have TheSky6 and wouldn't even know that it ever existed. I've been running TheSkyX for the last 14 months. I now don't miss TheSky6 for anything except the missing horizon draw editor (which alas I noticed right off the bat). If you notice any other missing important TheSky6 features, please go over to the SB support forums and request them.
Its all progress. Its a bit like Canon EOS not supporting old lenses. Nikon does, so its a marketing advantage for Nikon but I suppose some technical improvements may well be incompatible with previous versions. By the way it does work a bit. But it seemed to do erratic tracking where I would get the occasional focus image with elongated stars like it stopped tracking for a second.
Correct. It's a checkbox in CCDsoft->File->Preferences. However, a bigger issue is that CCDsoft doesn't come with the mount! In my opinion, it should. Especially when you read the manual and it starts talking about using CCDsoft to collect PE information for PEC programming. As a Paramount MX owner, if you don't already have a CCDsoft serial number, you can request a CCDsoft serial number and they will give it to you - free of charge for the asking.
That's odd. Perhaps in the rush to get the product out they left out a few things they could have done.
Yup. I think it is hands down the best manual they have produced yet.
A complete PDF copy of which you can find in TheSkyX->Help. Use the supermodel feature any time you have more than six points mapped. Don't try to add terms on your own. Supermodel does this for you and does a better job than you can do manually. Don't even bother with the suggest button. It's no longer useful.
Thanks for that.
Works with PME mounts too. Usually gets me within six or so knob tics before even running the first Tpoint run to fine tune polar alignment. Not bad.
[Emphasis mine.]That is a particularly nasty and uncalled for thing to say. It's not just like they can drop in the old CCDsoft code and boom, make it so, or something. This is the fastest changing and improving area of TheSkyX. They have limited resources and are in fact working as hard as they can on integrating all of CCDsoft's features into the Camera Add On. Features which you will obtain 100% for free (because The Camera Add On has no subscription fee) as they are added over the next months and years. However long it takes, you will get them all eventually. In the mean time you can set the Camera Add On to use "CCDsoft's Camera." Or at least you can if you already have CCDsoft. I think they should give it to you with the mount. See above about requesting a CCDsoft serial number if you don't already have one.
Perhaps it was unjustified. Especially if they give you CCDsoft for free if you ask. But how many would know that and why didn't they add it in if they give it for free? It is true you the camera control part for free as part of the program and it is something they are working on but it certainly isn't good enough to use a stand alone imaging program. As far as doing it for money perhaps that is uncalled for. However many companies these days do exactly that sort of thing for money. Especially software companies where you can see how they try to force a new sale. Perhaps SB isn't one of those which would be refreshing.
It is true it is a start and some who just want to do a quick image may be able to use it. Eventually it could be a valuable part of the program and make the SkyX a much more appealling piece of software.
Ouch. This is a rather sketchy third party anecdotal report. Please have the actual user's of the actual mounts come here and describe the problems and how they were addressed. That would be fair and I hope much more informative.
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They were private communications to me. One had bad spikes in the PE that would knock the autoguider off track. He couldn't autoguide as a result. He was told PEC would correct it. It didn't. They eventually gave him a new worm and I didn't hear anything after that so I expect it was fixed. Another is on the PMX support forum currently regarding PE above the spec level and he was told to send the mount back.
Looking over images from last night I see I was achieving quite round stars very often when the conditions improved. Those that weren't were wind affected.
By the way I found T-point would fail doing plate solving again last night. I did what Terry said (at least I think I did, the only adjustment seems to be the top adjuster in source extraction setup/detection threshold) of increasing the number of stars it recognises.
Greg.