I am so sorry this state of affairs has happened. We will miss you more than a lot. I posted some really stupid questions (sorry 'bout that) and you answered them anyway, with alacrity. Your responses were always on point and well stated. I would gladly pay triple for the product, especially considering the support you have given. I can certainly understand the burn-out part and I think, if you ever decide to come back to your project, you could go at a slower pace. I wouldn’t complain.
I wish you the best of success in your endeavors. You have achieved more to date than most people achieve in a lifetime. I am sure you are greatly respected by your friends and the critics. No problem in a change of pace. I am sure that there are people who will carry forward, and you will be permanently or temporarily missed for sure. You will regain your love for looking out the spaceship window. The passion ebbs and flows like the tide in some people. We all await your reports of how things are going in the near and longer term.
Thank you for all that you did! This software is the best. I was quite amazed with the speed things were done and the responses to any and all questions on this forum! You have my gratitude for EVERYTHING you have did to push the envelop forward for us amateur astrophotographers. I can’t imagine not using SGPro. Enjoy your time with your family. Life is so very short so make the most of it!
@Ken
Can’t add anything new to what has already been said…but I do want to add my name to the long list of ‘happy campers’ that use SGP at every possible opportunity. Thanks for the superhuman effort that you have put into this to get us working so effortlessly through the night hours.
Thank you once again for all your very hard work and your very classy reply to this thread.
Hope great things await you and your family in this upcoming summer season!
I would just like to say a big thank you for a super product and phenomenal support.
I have been one of many who has burdened you with problems.
Wishing you some quality time with your family.
I understand why you take this decision and in your context I think anybody would do the same, thanks for the software and effort.
I am a bit disappointed cause I have invested fair amount of time learning SGP and not just that I have made some buying decisions based on SGP (ASCOM support and stability is not the same for all hardware).
Why not slow down the pace? IMO the SGP community never demanded more than what you decided to give to the project. I also feel that features prioritization could be better. Why not hire a couple of experience users to deal with the support so you could focus on features or fixes? I am sure that without all the support related task investing 4h a week on SGP will move forward the project and you will regain the joy of coding SGP. Just some random thoughts.
In case your decision if final could you open source it? If the codebase stays static eventually ASCOM compatibility will break and that will be the end of SGP.
Thanks, and I hope you give it a second or third thought, I am sure you can find a midpoint.
Thank you for being so open and frank with us all…and thank you (and Jared) for a truly superb piece of software …and thank you for the world class service and support you’ve provided us all with over the past few years.
I was surprised and very sad to read your message, but I fully understand your feelings. I suffered a work related “burn-out” a couple of years ago and had to take a step back for the sake of my health. Like you I’d lost touch with my family and friends, and just stopped enjoying life. Unlike you, I didn’t recognise the signs and failed to realise that there’s nothing more important than family and health … and without those there’s not a lot of point in anything else.
I’m now enjoying spending time with my wife and daughter, , and working on new ways to spend my time productively. I hope you are able to do the same and wish you all the very best for the future.
Thank you again for all you’ve done - you’ll be greatly missed.
Because I don’t know how to… I am learning. After talking with Jared (I didn’t want to speak for him), he will be taking a look at support (at a slower pace) while I am collecting myself and trying to learn how to do just this. This is not a goodbye to SGPro…
I am of the opinion this is not time wasted. SGPro is fairly stable and me taking a break for three or so months does not invalidate your time investment.
It is something to consider, but I really think I will be back… like more than 90% chance of it. As a matter of fact, I will probably even work on SGPro during this “sabbatical”, just in a different context… meaning working on stuff that I enjoy and stuff that doesn’t feel like it has urgency or dates or commitments wrapped around it (the stuff that excited me in the first place).
I do see this as a “taking the foot off the gas”. During the past year Ken has done the majority of the feature and support work as I had my second son during that span and quite literally had very little free time. I’m thankful for him to have given me that chance and this will be the same for him. I hope that he can actually find the ability to disconnect…without me completely pulling his forum access
So we’re effectively just slowing down. I’ll still be here on a daily basis in a little more capacity than I have been. Ken will be taking a hiatus and will likely still be active on sgp just not on the support side for the time being.
To be clear MSS and SGP are not going anywhere. We’re just going to develop at a more realistic pace for a company that has to currently exist in our free time.
The latest SGP version is pretty stable so I am not worry about it. My last 9 consecutive SGP automated sequence runs have been successful unsupervised with many different versions of SGP and not a single issue. Newer revisions are pretty much more like improvements especially the new, very cool and robust auto focus implementations.
There are many things I’d like to see in products being developed. It’s easy to be selfish in these wishes and consternation when something changes. However, I remind myself the one’s running the business have the ultimate say in what is added and removed. Respect, temperament, and informed decision-making is the customer’s prerogative!
Ken and company seem to be genuine and reasonable in their response to support and feature requests, more so than some other companies. I personally like their open nature to software development… though this is not open source!
Thank you for your labor of love in this great software. All the best to you and your family going forward.
I’ve been around since SG (no P) was a wrapper for Nebulosity. As someone who has also experienced a work-related burnout (working too hard because I loved my job), I’ve been worried about this coming for a long time - the effort you guys have put in has been Herculean. Slow down. Charge more if need be to make this venture sustainable. Rediscover your passion for astrophotography and reconnect with your family.
A suggestion (perhaps more to Jared for now) - give us seasoned users more time to answer questions before jumping in, and then only jump in to correct responses where the wrong advice is given. You guys jump in so fast that it’s easy to let you keep doing it - make the very knowledgeable user base sweat a little and work up the courage to respond. You guys are the life-blood of this software - don’t squander you essential contribution by getting swept up in support questions and demands of the user base for rapid gratification. It’s true that most of us can’t do support as well as you two, but if you don’t let us muddle along then we won’t get any better. Perhaps annotate a logfile for us so that we are less reliant on you to explain every entry - you should only be dealing with the ones that the user base can’t figure out. In short you gotta trust the user base more - a lot of us have been here since the early days and it’s astonishing to look back at all of the changes.
This is software I can’t do without, and I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to chip in to make your workload more sustainable. Your time away is the best thing we can wish for for the long-term viability of the software. Jared, don’t just leap in and try to replace Ken’s contribution on top of your own. You guys need a new support model - not just doing more - you’ve got to find a way to keep this sustainable (and that includes astrophotography time and family time - believe me, I work in an industry that sees a lot of marriage and health breakdowns due to overwork - I’ve never seen a case where I consider that sacrifice to work to have been worth the cost). Tell us how we can help more. Enjoy your rejuvenation time Ken
…Keith
As a new user I was very impressed from the outset of using SGP, not only the program but the level of support you and your team have provided, adding to this your amazing responsiveness to users requests and updates, in my eyes, gives you the title of ‘supreme product and service’. I am warmly relating to your reasoning to to take a break and wish you well
First, thanks for this wonderful software ! You made so many things possible for me which would, otherwise, take me, maybe, 5-10 years to realize at my pace.
I have been watching you guys breathlessly and to be honest I was expecting a burnout at least 3 years ago. You have exceeded all my expectations with your performance.
This has been an amazing ride for all of us but it’s time to stop for a while and digest all the toys you have given to us.
Please take all the time you need and spend some time with the family while rejuvenating your interest in the hobby. You both have contributed immensely to the lives of your fellow astroimagers.
Ken, I can’t believe the pace you have been keeping and it’s no wonder you need a good break. I can’t imagine imaging without SGP, so I sure hope you can come back refreshed eventually. I can’t thank you and Jared enough for the progress you have enabled me to make with my imaging the last few years. You’re the best.
Ken the rest is well deserved my friend…if you and Jared ever find yourselves on the East Coast the beer is on me…I have only been able to use SGP 3 or 4 times due to our weird weather (owned it for at least 6 months) here at the beach but I do read the forums every day to see whats up…you guys do a phenominal job…enjoy the family…
I started to use SGP because you gave me a copy to close a deal we made on a telescope I sold to you.
At first I wasn’t sure I cared. Then I became intrigued. And today, it has completely changed how I approach my hobby.
Now, I’m able to socialize at Almost Heaven, the Winter Star Party, and other outings rather than spend my nights huddled over my computer screen. Sometimes I sit in a chair and actually look at the sky or wander around and look through a giant dob. And at the end of the week, I feel much less exhausted.
I like SGP so much that I am giving a very basic presentation on it at OkieTex, this fall. Something mostly geared for folks who have never used SGP (or any software to automate image acquisition), to let them know what it can do to make their imaging experience more enjoyable.
Thanks for your contribution to the community and to me personally.
I hope that after some well-deserved time with your family, you may be able to find a formula where most or all of the routine support effort could be handled by others, and you can again find pleasure on the development side of things. Or at the very least, hopefully you will reconnect with your love for astronomy.
