Hello, I thought about making this post for a long time, I’ve finally decided that if I just lurk, instead of posting, then you won’t know my feedback, so here goes…
I downloaded the trial a week ago, my friend keeps talking about how wonderful the software is and how I need to switch over. Here is what my experience has been / is:
First some background, I’ve been doing Astrophotography for just under a year now, and have only in the last 4 months started getting really successful results. I’m currently using my Canon 70D DSLR, an Explore Scientific ED127, an Orion “magnificent mini” autoguider setup, and an Orion Atlas mount that I had to rebuild after I bought i used. I started using a combination of Stallarium, Backyard EOS, Astrotortilla, and PHD2 in order to get my best images. While this combo has proven reliable, it’s very labor dependent in that I as the human have to constantly remember to do the correct action at the right time in order for things to work properly (Backyard EOS will tell PHD2 to Dither, but you have to use Astrotoritilla “by hand” to plate solve). So while it works wonderfully, it’s also more labor intensive.
My good friend who I go out imaging with a lot, has a CCD setup and has been using SGP for quite a while. When I learned that it would support DSLR I thought I would give the trial a shot. I was out at one of our darksites last night for my first real go at using the software after having done the simulator tutorials.
After setting up and polar aligning with my PoleMaster, I fired up SGP, created my hardware profile (luckily I had most of the needed info on hand from my other software, and I also had cell service at this darksite thankfully so I could lookup the pixel size of my sensor). I then created a simplistic sequence to shoot some of the Andromeda galaxy (wanted to start with a fairly bright object to make troubleshooting easier), and that’s when I started getting odd images. They were very dark and only contained a few stars. They looked underexposed. However the software was dutifully counting down the 5 min exposures, so I continued like this for a few hours, thinking I must be crazy. I then swapped to Backyard EOS to compare and could see that indeed something was very wrong.
After much searching on the interwebs I finally stumbled upon a post (and I apologize I can’t find it again, otherwise I’d give full credit to the guy who posted this fix), but it turns out that Mirror Lockup causes the software to only take the exposure for the time of the mirror lockup setting, in my case 2 seconds, yet the software counts down the full 5 min. This feature works correctly in Backyard EOS and since I had been using that setting successfully for months I kept it in my setup of SGP initially.
Eventually by the end of the night I was able to get a few subs of the Flame and Orion Nebula’s with SGP, and I ended up using it to get my calibration frames (bias, dark, flats), and btw the Flat’s wizard while nice, failed after X number of attempts, but turned out had it continued for 2 more iterations it would have been there (I ended up restarting it and setting manually the max exp. time and it was able to home in on the proper settings a little faster that time).
All in all - I’m pretty on the fence for the price right now. If I already owned a CCD and filterwheel and autofocus setup, then I’d be using your software all the way, but for my current equipment, and given the bugs I described (yes I most Def. consider the Mirror lockup thing a Bug that should be documented), I may end up holding off until I can finally afford to get a moonlight focuser setup I’ve been eyeing.
I hope that my experience and feedback will help you out. I think your software has some extremely amazing features if you have the hardware to back it up, but for those of us who are in a transition phase, it may make sense to wait on the purchase of SGP.
Best Regards