CraigFair wrote:
So you spent your money on a WiFi setup and use Stellarium to align and select objects???
Craig
Well, yes and no.
I had a Toshiba laptop and started using it out at the mount to operate it remotely, when Ronnie clued me in about Team Viewer, and later I found Tight Vnc, to use as a computer to computer interface.
Then I pretty much wasted a chunk of change on the Intel Compute Stick. It worked, but was rather slow and had a lot of drawbacks.
Then after my Toshiba Laptop up and died after 12 years (The black screen of death), I now have the Baby Dell 2 in 1 Laptop/Tablet. Which runs the mount and telescope out back, and WiFi's to my desktop inside. (Very fast and reliable, I'll add.) When I revamped everything for the compute stick, I moved my StarTech powered USB hub onto my telescope, and hooked up the mount to it.
So now I use a single USB cable from the hub down to the Baby Dell USB3 port. The Baby Dell also has a big size advantage with a 500 Gb hard drive, and 4 Gb of RAM, and a micro SD card slot. I use the micro SD card to store my image gatherings. Then I can move that to my desk computer for processing.
Stellarium runs my mount as a selecting and slewing program. It has since I learned how to have it control my mount.
I'm doing my alignment the same way I learned initially. 2 + 4 alignment stars. Except I'm using the Infinity camera and the main telescope, instead of my guide scope, to center the alignment stars.
It works good for me in part due to I don't move my mount. So my Polar Alignment is as stable as if I was using a pier. I simply check that Polaris is in my Guide Scope, then run through my alignment.
Alignment always goes out the window when the NexRemote is shut down, and the mount is shut down.
I've never really timed how long it takes me to run through an alignment, but probably 20 minutes to 1/2 an hour, I'd guess. (Maybe less)
The quality of object acquisition is good, always in the Infinity's FOV, and usually close to the middle. I fine adjust it and then start PHD2 to guiding. After that an object stays right where I started until I'm ready to move on.
I hope it works great for you. It sounds like it does plate solving to get it's alignment. Poke a button on the provided hand controller, and it goes from there.