First impression on Kstars+EKOS+INDI

milosz wrote: Hi All,
Sorry for the lengthy post but I couldn't resist. I was so impressed with Kstars and Ekos I had to write about it
First of all many thanks for the great job you’ve done with Kstars and Ekos. I didn’t expect it to work so well. I managed to get all my devices working during the first session and almost got to serious imaging. There were some small problems on the way though.
Kstars crashes a lot when zooming and pointing map to found targets. However it might be “fixed” by Jasem here:
lists.kde.org/?l=kstars-devel&m=138807351307331&w=2
Just tried that and similar fix applied also to asteroidscomponent.cpp solves the zoom problem.

Ekos is a modal window. On my small screen it almost completely covers the kstars map. When I try to minimize the ekos window, kstars also gets minimized, so I can’t use the map. That is pretty annoying

It happened a few times that I closed INDI configuration panel and I wasn’t able to reopen it from Ekos. I’m not really sure when it happens. Also when closing Ekos and Kstars, indiserver is not stopped automatically. One needs to remember about that or subsequent attempt to run INDI in ekos will fail (to connect to devices).

Guiding didn’t work for me. I wasn’t able to go through calibration. The error message I got was that the mount didn’t go back to the initial position in DEC axis. I remember I had pretty big backlash in DEC axis. PHD was able to cope with that. That is a pity that ekos can’t (so I have to finally fix it). Anyway, there is one question I didn’t find answer for when reading the: do I need to align the guider with the mount? I mean that the edges of the image are aligned with star motion when moving mount in RA/DEC.

After attempting to guide and calibrate the guider, EQMOD stopped working. I wasn’t able to slew the scope to new target. Restarting INDI usually helped, but it happened once that neither restarting INDI nor restarting kstars helped. I even tried disconnecting EQDIR. Only laptop restart helped resolving the problem.

Plate solving worked well. However there is one annoying feature. Every time I start EQMOD I have to fill in the scope and guider aperture and focal length. I wasn’t able to save these values between restarts.

CCD (capture) module wasn’t used a lot. I only took preview pictures because of the missing guiding. There was one annoying bit though. I had 2 cameras defined: main and guide. Every time I started ekos, guide cam appeared in the CCD module and Align module. This was tricky as plate solving didn’t work at first. Only after a moment I realized that I was using guide cam instead of main cam for Align.

Actually, Ekos is a modeless window, and I can minimize it without affecting KStars at all. A modal window is one where you have to close it in order to continue using the application. At any rate, I added an improvement and made it a top-level window, so it will appears now in the taskbar as well.

It appears in the task bar, but I'm not able to minimize ekos and leave the kstars maximized. Maybe this is the desktop problem. I'm using LXDE on Debian sid.

There is a slight chance to have clear skies tonight, so I will try increasing the number of iterations (docs site says it's possible). As for the second question, you understood correctly. Some guiding programs require camera to be oriented in line with the mount axes. Good to hear I don't have to worry about that.

I will try that. I have verbose output turned on and some logs showed up in the window. However after the guide attempt the logging was silent - no logs

I pressed 'save' and assumed the values will be restored on the next connection. I will check the settings.

However on Windows I had one feature that I can't find in Ekos. It's implemented in astrotortilla. I couldn't get AT to work, so I took some code from there and crafted my own solution. I was using the image from the previous session to point the telescope in the exactly same location. Do you have a plan to have something like this available. The procedure is pretty simple and all pieces are already in place:
1. take fits from previous session
2. plate solve the picture and save the coordinates as reference
3. slew telescope to the reference
4. take picture after slew
5. plate solve and compare to the reference
6. go to 3 until the current position is within X arcsec (say 10) from reference (with my HEQ5 it's close to impossible to get exactly identical position)

BTW, what are your settings for guiding? Maybe I'm missing something obvious? Are you using eqmod or guide port on camera? Today guiding failed on PHD as well because of gale we had. But at least phd calibration passed (sort of).

I wasn't able to reproduce it again \o/ There is something weird with turning on sidereal tracking in eqmod. Pressing 'Track' button doesn't always work. Probably I'm missing some step. Today in the last attempt it just worked. I pressed 'Track' and than 'Sidereal' and it did the trick. I suspect my previous problems with guiding and slewing after guide were related to this. Today I was watching the logs and I got 'guiding not allowed without tracking' error.

I'm writing about different thing. I assume you refer to alignment. I don't have permanent setup and I do alignment every time I start the session (starting from deleting the points from last session). But I meant something different. When I image the same object for couple of nights I would like to have the same frame every time. The easiest way to do it is to take one of the frames from last session, plate solve it and slew to the solution. But this isn't always accurate, so it requires 2 - 3 iterations. With permanent setup 1st slew might be accurate enough. But still there is no solve-image-from-previous-session feature in Ekos at the moment.

To sum up, there is surely some mechanical problem with the mount, but it's not something terrible. Tuning guide settings did the trick of passing calibration. The guide didn't work great though (around +/- 3arcsec). There was almost no wind and I noticed the guide sometimes passes too big corrections. Anyway, it sort of works now and just needs fine tuning.

It was on both axes. The long pulse was due to the fact I wasn't able to pass through calibration without it. Anyway, fine tuning guiding is a minor problem comparing to other issues here.

Hmm, I think I don't suffer from it. My locale is en_GB. I was referring to the fact that although the 'sidereal' button was pressed, mount wasn't actually tracking (just after connecting to eqmod). It works similar way to Windows, but on Windows when the button is pressed, the mount is tracking.