I first want to say that Mr. Mutlaq you and your team have created a fine suite of astrophotography tools, a great driver library, and of course the planetarium software as well. This is what drew me to Kstars\Ekos\Indi, the all in one solution. It will be exciting to see it grow and I am dedicated to being a part of that process. I have imaged with Canon DSLRs for many years, first starting with Nebulosity then to Backyard EOS and now to Ekos.
This past Friday and Saturday were my first nights out with Ekos. I let it loose on two scopes, a Meade 127mm Triplet on a Losmandy GM100 and a Meade 14'' LX200ACF on a Losmandy GM200. The Losmandy GM100 and GM200 are push-to mounts from the late 80's still going strong. The GM200 has digital setting circles (monitored by an Argo Navis) and the GM100 I use the mechanical setting circles. I have a Canon T5i on both scopes and both are off-axis guided. The guide cameras are an SBig STi on the Meade 127mm and a Lodestar on the Meade 14'' ACF.
I experienced a few issues I wanted you to know about, maybe they are already known but if not I wanted to make sure you knew about them, so without further delay here is the list:
1. When framing with a DSLR sometimes 20 seconds is not enough to pick up a faint object and all its details, even at the highest of ISO settings, is there a way to increase this? Remember I have push-to mounts so plate solving is not a solution for me, I must center my targets the old fashioned way.
2. Sometimes when framing (Focus tab) my image dimensions would get flipped, meaning instead of 5204 x 3678 as it should be the image became 3678 x 5204 in the Fits Viewer. It did this at random but what was really annoying about it was it would stay with the wrong dimension even if I shut down Kstars\Ekos\Indi. As I said before my cameras are Canon T5i's and I have two of them on two different scopes, two different computers and they both exhibited this random odd behavior. I had to reboot the machines to get Ekos to use the proper image dimensions again. I know there is the oddity with the gp-photo driver in that you must capture an exposure (and maybe send it to dcraw??) to determine the resolution of the camera, maybe this is where the bug (accidental dimension flip) lies. It makes centering a target quite fun as your usual directions are now flipped, lol!
3. Again when framing, when using the "Auto-Stretch" filter, this would cause Kstars (Ekos and everything else) to lock up almost as if an endless loop condition had occurred. It may not happen right away, sometimes it does though, but give it 3-5 framing exposures and it will happen eventually. The "Equalize" filter also exhibited this same behavior. I was using 3, 10, and 20 second framing exposures both with darks and lights and it would happen with any of them. When this happens the bottom-left corner indicator on the Fits Viewer is yellow, if that is of any help. I have to force quit Kstars as the lockup does not go away.
4. I am a manual focuser, someday I may have motorized focusers but not anytime soon, what I would really like is if the HFR plot graph also worked in manual mode as well. I saw no plots being drawn when in manual mode, basically you just have the number to go off of. Also it would be ideal if in manual mode one can select the star to use to calculate the HFR against. I have no idea what it is calculating that HFR off of in manual mode? Does it pick a star automatically? Maybe one could use the focuser simulator (so you can use auto focus mode) to get the graph but even then you risk the auto focus routine cutting out short on you, maybe setting a high tolerance would prevent this though, just thought about that.
5. I noticed in Indi when I set the ISO in the Image Settings tab and saved the configuration this was not being saved, it would always default to the highest resolution? I have the setting set to always load saved configuration on connect.
6. In regards to changing the ISO, it is quite difficult to have to find the Indi window and change the ISO from when I am framing\focusing to when I am actually imaging. Of course when framing you want a higher ISO so the target shows up in a shorter amount of time but when imaging you will drop it down of course to avoid higher noise. Maybe displaying an ISO dropdown in Ekos would be helpful, both on the framing tab and on the CCD tab, and in the CCD tab maybe it should be one of the properties of your sequence.
7. The guiding graph line colors are quite hard to see with a red filter over the screen, maybe some configuration of their color and maybe even their thickness is in order at some point.
That is it for now, let me know if I can be of any further assistance. I would love to help fix some of these but I am not sure of the process with that, just let me know as I am a software developer.