Grierson

Many thanks Pierre. I will check them out.

The initial excitement, in Sept/Oct, over the availability of this product seems to have died down. Would any ‘early adopter’ care to share any thoughts on their experience so far?

As a Pixinsight novice can I just put a word in for Asto Dude’s 12 videos for absolute beginners. I havn’t the experience to say whether they are better or worse than others mentioned above but I am finding them very useful.

Thanks, I can't get away form York's light pollution at the moment so quite envious.

Super image Jon. Was it shot locally or from a dark site?

Thanks chaps for the re-assurances. I just had the impression that my process console was going quite slowly when compared with the tutorial presentations. (Which could of course have been speeded up) The drives are SSD but I would guess that there is an accumulation of junk so it might indeed be time for clean install. Thanks again - John

I wonder if anyone can point me to the ideal spec. for running this software. As a PI virgin attempting to mimic the basic YouTube tutorials I find that my homebrew i5 3.80 GHz machine with 16 Gb of RAM is a bit pedestrian. Replacing the processor is out of the question but I wonder if increasing the RAM to 32 Gb would give any noticeable improvement? Thanks - John

Thanks Bryan and all the other folk who have taken the time to respond. I have had a clean start, removed everything and carefully re-installed APT, PS2 and the UCAC3PS catalogue again and 'eureka' Point Craft functions as it should. I obviously missed a trick somewhere along the line. Many thanks again - John

Thanks stash_old I will take both off and only re-install PS2 and see what happens!

Thanks gentlemen. I am running APT as Administrator and Point Craft does know where the files are. I have identical folders on both old and new laptops running W10. I have not done as Mark suggests yet but I will now go away and try. Thanks - John

I have APT on an elderly laptop running APT v3.53. Plate solving works just fine. Both PS2 and ASPS work. I have replaced the old laptop with a new model and installed APT v3.54.1 and PS2 and ASPS however when I come to run Point Craft I get the message: 'PlateSolve can't find the APM catalog. Please install it before proceeding. The catalog directory can be selected from the file menu' and I can get no further. I have both the APM and UCAC3PS catalogues installed. I have rolled back APT to an earlier version with the same result. I have posted the issue on the APT forum with no response as yet but in the mean time I wonder if any SGL member has had a similar problem or can suggest any solution. Many thanks - John

HEQ5 but being an OAP weight is an important criteria!

Hi, welcome to the forum. I think you need to recheck the model numbers. However if you are outside the UK and you are quoting local SW models then I regret I can’t help. You might mean HEQ5 and EQ6r and if so the EQ6 is heavier and more expensive than the HEQ5 but both should cope well with your refractor. If the weight and cost are not issues then I would go for the EQ6.

And another +1 here for the belt mod. As an aside, it seems daft to produce what is a decent mount for the money and market it with such a design shortcoming. Scared me to death when I first got mine.

Others may differ but I would respectfully suggest that you need to be as nice as possible to SWMBO. I wouldn’t want to put my 80ED and mount (camera and other bits and pieces) on my Manfrotto tripod. BTW are you sold on the EQ6? I would guess an HEQ5 is more cost effective. John