Focusing software

[Charles Dunlop]

What software do you guys use and do you use a motor focuser? I'm going to upgrade crawford and am considering some sort of autofocusing tool. Love to know what everyone else uses.

[Jeff McFarlin]

Indeed it is. The Rumblepad 2 wireless is natively supported in NexRemote.

It's pretty cool. At outreach events I can do a neat trick. I can slew to 'next target' or whatever it is, can't remember exactly, haven't done it in 6 months, from 25' away and the mount miraculously slews right to it, and everyone's like 'ooohhh, ahhhh, how did you do that?' when Jupiter or whatever pops right in the eyepiece.

Every command you can do within NexRemote you can do on the gamepad. Except enter numbers, altho maybe there's a way to do that, too. Either way, my fingers stay warm.

Jeff

[Marc Basti]

Trevor, not being in ccd country (I'm still a dslr boy), can you just take a single image and have it display on your lap top? Using a mask takes me less than 5mn, 3-5 ten sec exps. is usually enough (a bit longer exp.20-30s w/Ha filter). Marc

[Trevor Woodrow]

Hi Marc, no you are right. Should have used the mask, but was just so excited to get out after over a month absence, I did not.

[Russ Ruggles]

I'm imaging with a DSLR and have recently purchased a nifty little program called BackyardEOS. With it you can use the FWHM feature or use a Bahtinov mask or both. This program uses the Live view feature of your camera and enhances it so you can even see faint stars plus you can zoom in 5X or 10X for even a better look. At $24 and a free 30 day trail IMHO it's worth the money.

It's also loaded with a lot of other features like Image Capture, Drift Alignment, PDH dithering, and the list goes on.

Here's a link if you're interested.

Russ
http://backyardeos.binaryrivers.com

[Lars Hansen]

FLI-DF2 + FocusMax, Optec TCF-S + FocusMax, My favourite FLI-PDF (so far)