mikeprimm

Just joined the forums today, so 'Hi!' everyone! I'm another Unistellar kickstarter customer - received my scope a few weeks back, and have been having a good time messing with it, for the most part. I think the software needs some work - it works nicely in as much as you use it to do exactly what they want you to do, but it can be a bit fussy when you are trying to do anything else. Some examples: 1) As of the writing for this, you can turn off the 'auto' on the live view - exposure time and gain - and you can do the same in the 'Enhanced' mode (where it does the stacking and filtering and such), but each time you leave 'Enhanced mode' and re-enter, it loses the manual settings and returns to auto mode. This is a huge pain if you are trying to mosaic an object (like Neowise or Andromeda) that extends beyond the field of view. You wind up needing to re-enter the values each time, and the interface is slider-only (no number entry field). Software should allow the manual settings for enhanced to 'stick' between enter/exiting the mode. 2) It would be REALLY nice to have the image capture be able to be set around a specific amount of time in 'Enhanced Mode' - once again, when doing mosaics or the like, it makes getting consistent results more of an art than a science. 3) The 'live' mode - which is really the only thing usable for bright objects like planets - mysteriously doesn't support picture saving! You can screen grab the whole app, sure, but this is just a silly and rather odd oversight. 4) Perhaps it is my scope, but when in 'Live' mode, the Auto will often Gain up to max or near max - which would be fine if the amount of gain noise was less. I tend to find myself going to manual and setting the gain to about 3/4 of the max in order to avoid lots of grain. On the whole, I've been very happy though - I live in the Austin suburbs, which has about as bad light pollution as anywhere, and I'm successfully observing things I've never been able to see properly with my old 8" Newtonian - so definitely enjoying the scope, and looking forward to ongoing improvements with the software! While I'm at it - let me share my latest milestone: my observation of Pluto over the last two nights