Tonight I tried some EAA observing from inside the house using the new Raspberry Pi Astroberry to control the telescope and camera. Spent a lot of time just messing and I have a lot of things to figure out, but it was a good time. I learned a lot and stayed warm doing so 🙂

I set things up before it got dark and tested all the connectivity. I thought I was going to have issues with the speed of my wireless network, but it ended up working just fine.

I did a lot of tinkering and a lot of testing…

…and here are the results!

A 5 minute stack (30 x 10 Seconds with 220 Gain) of NGC891 through the SV305 attached to the AT66ED on the CG5 mount controlled remotely using a Raspberry Pi which I accessed using KStars/Ekos/INDI running on my desktop (In. My. Office!).

NGC 891 is an edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. Not my best image of NGC891, but not bad for a terrible polar alignment, an off balance mount, a $150 camera, and only 5 minutes of data. All from my comfy warm office. 🙂

I also got my guide camera working on the SV106, so longer exposures coming soon. I really need to stop being lazy and get my polar alignment dialed in. I ran the polar alignment routine in Ekos and I am WAY off… I did not polar align it since that would mean leaving the comfort of my office, it’s a balmy 29 F outside. I’ll fix it soonish. I think my gear may be a little off balance as well, I’ll get that taken care of tomorrow in the daylight.

I am going to do a post on how I set up KStars on my desktop to access the INDI Web Manager on the Raspberry Pi in the next week or so… but for now I’m calling it a night.

Looking forward to a clear sky tomorrow night… hoping to add a few Open Clusters to my Messier Log.