Connecting The Stargo To External Astrophotography Software - Avalon Instruments StarGo2 Pro User Manual

4. Use the directional keys to move around the telescope, the GoTo to slew the telescope to
the selected object and the Align button to synchronize the telescope to the object
centered in the eyepiece to increase the pointing precision.
3.4

Connecting the StarGO to external astrophotography software.

To shoot astrophotography it is necessary to use specialized software (i.e. Sequence Generator Pro
-SGP, N.I.N.A., CCD Ciel, etc) that performs all the operations needed to exactly frame to object of
the shooting and, obviously, performs all the photographic actions required by the CCD or DSLR
cameras.
The StarGO2 has the advantage to provide a direct connection of the photographic equipment to
the internal Raspberry that can take charge of all those operations. This is done using the
INDI/EKOS that, even if it constitutes a complete suite of reliable astrophotography tools, could
not be the preferred by many of the users.
For this reason, in this section we will show how to use with StarGo2 several software suites which
may be more familiar to users, making it a very flexible mount control system.
It is useful to repeat that in the next paragraphs, we assume that the PC (essentially Window but
also MAC/Linux when the tools are available) is wireless or wired connected to the StarGO2,
following the instructions given in the previous sections.
It is also obvious that the next sections will be essentially aimed at the operations needed to allow
the astrophotography tools to speak to the StarGO2 and not to the use of such tools, especially as
regards the connection and use of other hardware devices other than the StarGO2.
The key point in connecting the software to the StarGO2 is to access to the ASCOM chooser which
allow, first of all to access to ALPACA, which is the essential environment for managing equipment
connected to non-Windows computer, using ASCOM compatible applications, such as the ones
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.
What is different for each application is the way the ASCOM Chooser is accessed. Once we are in
from of this panel, the way to follows for connection the StarGO2 is identical. In section 3.4.1 we
will show how the ASCOM chooser is invoked by each application and in section 3.4.2 the common
procedure for all application is shortly described.
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Figure 3.28