Hi - my name is Colin McGill - I'm a relatively experienced imager. My main scope is located at a remote observatory in Spain, and I'm used to using The Sky X, but I want to set up a more mobile rig for use here in Surrey so I can try imaging on the South Downs where the light pollution is ~ 10 times better than my back garden.

I'm using an HEQ5, a Canon DSLR 450d with a Wiliams Optics Star 71 (2015 version), and have set up Kstars/Ekos/Indi v 2.7.3 on a Raspberry Pi 3 (thank you James for your excellent tutorial).

Firstly, I am very impressed - after the clouds cleared last night I managed to get Capture and Slew working, focus my scope and used Ekos to take a few automated runs.

However, I have a few questions, about how to use Ekos:

1) I generally focus manually with a Bahtinov mask - however, when I frame the star (Capella), I could barely see the spikes with a 5 second exposure. This has been more than enough using The Sky, so I don't think its the focus length, but something about the stretch I was applying (I used Autostretch, but tried others). In the end, I gave up and simply used the HDR values, though this took a while. Is there a recommended way to focus with a mask?

2) I didn't sync at all, which left my pointing~ 2 degs away from the correct spot. Of course, platesolve sorted this out (though I sometimes needed multiple moves to get to the right location). Again, is there a recommended way to e.g. Sync to one star first, then use platesolve, or to automatically Sync then move to the right location?

3) I managed to create a scheduled imaging session - track, align and capture. That worked well, but I had two problems: a) I could not find a way to reset the job (I double clicked but when I reran the job, I was just told it was completed). Secondly, I set up a series of different exposure times as a sequence file. This worked well from the Camera tab, but when I used it as part of a scheduled run, Ekos only took the first set of images (I had 4 sets of 2 images each of different exposure lengths). Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you again,

Colin

P.S. Apologies if this is posted twice - I can't see it in the forums.

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