M34 - StellarMate first light

[wimvb]

Last week I purchased the StellarMate OS and app, and the last few days I've been playing with it. Despite 6 years experience with INDI and Kstars, I still had some trouble configuring everything. The StellarMate app isn't always easy to navigate. On my Samsung Galaxy Tablet, some of the buttons in the app were unresponsive at times. Especially when clicking on a number field to open the numeric keyboard, the app was slow. And the configuration of optical trains assumed ST4 guiding by default (which I don't use). It took me a while to figure that out. And I still haven't come to grips with autofocusing, but that may in part be due to poor sky conditions.

Earlier this week I experienced how easy it is to switch capture software with a Raspberry Pi and INDI. We've had a few clear nights, and I started configuring StellarMate, but after a while I just swapped SD-cards in the Raspberry Pi and did my imaging in Astroberry. So easy!

Here it is: first light. Earlier this evening we had another gap in the clouds and I pointed my telescope at Messier 34, which was conveniently placed in the South. I got 55 minutes of data before the clouds moved in, 4 x 5 minutes per filter. I had to discard one green sub due to star trails.

Processed in PixInsight (without any noise reduction). There are even a few small galaxies in the background.

Edited January 20 by wimvb