Hah, yeah.
I was using the QHY5L-II for guiding not the ST-i in my sig. I found it pretty good overall, but I suspect the ST-i might be slightly better. The ST-i wins hands-down for convenience for taking darks though.
The biggest win for the trip though was with Astrotortilla - it was just great in sorting out the polar alignment and syncing/plate-solving.
The biggest loser though was Windows 8 on my new laptop. It did not play nice with the USB attachments when it was running on battery power. It was forever disconnecting the camera at inopportune times - fortunately each time was when it was about to start an image grab, not part way through. But this was quite painful when dealing with AT's polar alignment checker (it takes 2 pics to work out the error) - and Win8 did frequent stuff ups on the 2 pic, making the process fail. A big time waste that I have to sort out. It also made taking flats/dark flats difficult as it would die part way through. Fortunately I had my old Win7 netbook with me as well, so I hooked it up for those. As the netbook doesn't have the grunt for AT, I had to persist with Win8 and curse when it failed. Maybe someone knows about this type of problem. I'll create an appropriate post for it I think.
