While waiting for my Raspberry Pi4, I followed the suggestion to capture the pix from my DSLR directly on the Raspberry Pi3. Wow, big speed improvement and I can quickly look at the captured image using VNC on my lap to connect to the Pi and display the Canon CR2 file.

Now I just need to figure out how to speed up using Ekos Align.

After polar aligning the mount, I go from the parked home position and slew to the first alignment star (typically Vega). It just seems to take a long time from capture picture to the solution. The longest time seems to be from capturing image to starting the solver. I have tried running both the remote solver (with astrometry on the Raspberry Pi) and the online solver. It takes 1:30m to capture and image receive. Solving iteration takes about 100 sec. So with about 8 iterations to get to a solution, it takes awhile for the first star alignment.

I have the Raspberry Pi connected directly to the EQ6-R mount and controlling it with EQMOD. I was going to try and use the hand controller to do the initial alignment, but I have problems if both the hand controller and Raspberry Pi are connected to the mount. There seems to be some sort of conflict.

I'm curious if any other EQ6-R users have suggestions on speeding up alignment.

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