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Frédéric Auchère: Apt won’t flip at meridian unless you allow it , go to Tools > session craft -to edit flip settings . Apt forum is good for info Ivo will answer any questions you have . regards Dave |
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I was using version 3.52 up to now, which did not have "session craft" menu option. I've just installed the latest (version 3.82), and indeed I can now turn ON/OFF meridian flips. I'll try that as soon as I can! Thank you very much, this is what I was looking for! Frédéric |
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I used and adored APT for a year, but the one thing that got me looking at NINA was in-plan focusing, which is yet to be implemented in APT. This is where you autofocus during a sequence on changing filters or due to a change in temperature which you specify and so on....I know Ivo is working on that and once that is in, I will be back to APT for sure, as I love the interface. NINA has been excellent too - simple to connect the equipment, but imaging screen slightly counterintuitive at first; the software has generally been reliable and fast - autofocus works well. |
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| I started with APT. Good program, but the user interface is a little scattered (feels as though similar functions are not co located). Autofocus did not seem very sophisticated and once it passed the focus point, it didn't back up to it, it just stopped the autofocus routine (maybe a user knowledge problem). However after moving to NINA 1.10, I am very happy with the user configurable imaging window window and find the autofocus to be dead-on. Automatic sequence building with out scripting is wonderful. I Have it set to slew, plate solve, re-center target, autofocus and shoot the sequence. I have focus set to refocus if HFR changes by 5% or temperature changes by 1 degree (I have temperature sensor taped to OTA). 3 Target, unattended sequencing is routine now as are meridian flips (all unattended). I particularly like the pop up meridian flip histogram with count-down to flip and subsequent recenter and restart sequence steps shown in histogram. |
0.90
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IMO NINA has a lot of features but some of the them are a little clumsily organised. The Auto Meridian Flip - such a potentially dangerous thing (came withing 1cm of hitting tripod leg last night when i manually did this) APT has a nice flashing icon on the imaging screen to show you it is active and switching it on and off was easy to find via session craft button. NINA does not tell you AMF is active (from what i can see) you just have to know / visit the configuration screen. NINA allows you to move screens around easily - this is both a plus and a negative. I found that i sometimes confused myself by enabling / disabling screens and moving them around so that i lost where they were. I know this is my fault but it has caught me out a few times. The sequencing on NINA is good and fairly simple to use but has some weird restrictions. e.g. As part of the sequence screen you can also configure when auto focus should kick in (after n frames, when temperature drops etc) but for some reason NINA does not allow you to change the auto focus triggers when the sequence is running. I had to pause the sequence, make the changes i wanted, unpause the sequence. Not major, but annoying and when all said and done APT does not have this feature at all. One option about sequence that i would have liked is the ability to park after a sequence is complete. NINA can do this - but it is a general command configured somewhere else, not part of the sequence. Sometimes i want to park after a sequence (if it is going all night) somtimes i don't. So i would prefer to configure this feature from the sequencer Speaking of auto focus - another thing that NINA is not so great about, it does not tell you when you are missing something. So i enabled the auto focus and the HFR history graph but i forgot to press the "star" icon which enables HFR calculation. It was not obvious you had to do this and NINA did not warn me i had not switched it on and blindly carried on doing images without logging the HFR. The Star icon needs to be enabled everytime as it seems to forget that in the configuration. Weather integration. This is a great feature that NINA has put in. Once you set up your API keys you can use open weather to get NINA to report the weather. One oddity though - NINA only seems to show the current weather. It would be fantastic if it showed on the weather screen the weather for the rest of the night. but again, APT does not have this feature at all so one up on NINA. One feature of APT that i like way above NINA is that APT keeps you informed with audio cues and proper status lines. so when you perform a Pointcraft goto on APT it tells you "GOTO++ complete" when it has finished. NINA tells you on a status line that then after a few seconds disappears. There have been several times i have been sat waiting for NINA to finish Platesolving only to find out it had finished several minutes ago and I had not noticed the message. As i say APT has audio cues. I control my APT from a laptop in my living room (I know, fair weather astronomer, but i am lazy and don't like the cold  ). So i set things going make sure all seems to be working then sit with a cup of tea watching TV. Every few minutes i hear a nice audio from APT saying "Image complete" so i know things are working. I hear it when it is about to start doing plate solving, i hear it when it is about to hit meridian flip. These are all invaluable things for me.Summary: NINA is extremely promising, lots of great features, lots of potential, not as polished as APT. I will probably go back to APT for now and revisit NINA in 6 months to see how things are progressing. |
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I've been using SGP for a couple of months now and find myself getting frustrated with unreliability from time to time, whether it is in focusing or plate solving. So I've started looking at NINA since so many seem to be making the switch. I don't know anything about APT. But I'm a little weary of making too many changes and having to experiment. So whatever I use must be able to set up a session with filter changes with different exposure/duration settings, auto focus on filter changes, plate solving at session start (with periodically performing a plate solve during the session...which SGP does not do), meridian flips, dome control and OAG guiding. Will NINA or APT meet these needs? |
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Dale A Chamberlain: Maybe I’m mis-understanding, but CCDAutoPilot does all of those things. Are you saying that SGP doesn’t platesolve after focusing, meridian flips, new object pointing, etc? |
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| It does those things but I find myself fighting the software many times. Losing connections, losing settings that I've saved, etc. Just the other night, my telescope settings were blanked out of the equipment profile which was saved, or at least I thought it was. |
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Never had a glance at NINA. Ever since I began dealing with this hobby , I had the APT and over the years I see it developing. It won me for good after including plate solving features. Right now APT has everything I personally need for the job. Maybe I'm just used to it, but I find it easy to operate - imho the interface is friendly to use. Honestly - there have been drawbacks and problems like crushing the program in specific circumstances, but Ivo is very communicative - takes the complains into consideration and fixed the issues fast. And let's not forget it's quite cheap after all... |
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Frédéric Auchère: Hi all, I finally had the opportunity to test that feature yesterday. I did disable the auto-flips in the "session craft" menu. However, my AZ-EQ6 did flip anyway.... I think it has to do with the dithering (I'm dithering at every frame). Significantly after the flip (one hour or so), I stopped my sequence, commanded the mout back to the equivalent "counterweigth up" position (pointing at the same region of the sky), and started a new sequence. The first image went fine, but at the first dither, the mount flipped back to its "counterweigth down" position. So I have the impression that even though the meridian flip is disabled, dithering makes the mount flip anyway. Does anybody know if there is a way to avoid this? Frédéric |
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| I offered an opinion earlier, but here is another criteria to judge your software by. Do you have the confidence in the software (APT, NINA, SGP and others) to allow you to set it to run your target list and go to sleep with some hope that it will do the job so that when you get up at 5am your sequences have been centered, focused, shot and the mount is now parked and camera warmed. I just did this a few times with NINA and a good night of shooting and a good night's sleep is not to be discounted. Am I cheating? |
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Frédéric Auchère:Frédéric Auchère: i asked a similar question on Apt forum I wanted to take a set number of exposures the park but after first exposure it parked, ivo ‘s answer was Make one more line with exposure duration 0s which to execute the command |
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| I can agree to David's post and recommend the manual section session craft where it is very good described. |
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I started with APT (full version) but switched to NINA a few months ago so here's my take: Both are capable products that work. APT has an easier to understand GUI in my opinion. NINA can be a bit confusing at the beginning but after I got used to it I actually prefer it. I'd call APT rather image based because the GUI is fully centered around the image, in NINA that's more of a secondary thing. For features NINA wins hands down. Plate solving with ASTAP was a great plus back when APT didn't support it, now there's the flat wizard, the AF, built in planetarium, better sequence editor just as an example. I can't comment on the current development of APT but the NINA development is quite active and there are very frequent updates (on the beta channel at least) and apparently the sequence tabs will get a full overhaul soonish. Considering price, well NINA is Open Source and free whereas the full version of APT costs less than 19€ which really isn't much at all for what the software is capable of. |
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The one thing I don’t like about Nina is the Help forum is on Discord that’s a big No for me I like to be able to read threads on a particular issue . Dave |
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I started imaging with a DSLR and BackyardEOS. Then like alot of us I bought a cold camera and had to start over at controlling the camera. I picked APT. It’s a great program but with my longer focus 910mm refractor I’ve found myself spending more time focusing than I wanted. That made it hard to get any sleep as the scope is imaging. Your to dependent on the temperature drop of any particular night or a number of filter changes because APT does not yet have Auto Focus. About two months ago I bought SGP (Sequence Generator Pro)because… well… everybody did and it had the auto focus. Before I got into learning SPG I started hearing about the N.I.N.A. program and it also had auto focus. As it was free I saw no reason not to try both out at the same time and finish with the one I liked the best. SGP has a whole bunch of You Tube video’s on how to use it. NINA did have so many. Lots of video’s, that is the best way for me to learn so I stated with SGP. However, when I got into the videos, I had a very difficult time understanding them. SGP is a very powerful program but I was struggling so much I couldn’t get over that first hump of a learning curve into understanding it’s flow. As I said, there are whole bunch of videos for SGP but with all the updates and so forth the ones with the basics were so out of date and a bit fragmented in the information they provided it was making it very hard for me to put it all together. I ended up break from it and started looking at NINA. NINA on the other hand was so new the few videos available were close enough to the current revisions that when I watched them I was able to start linking it all together. Particularly because Cuiv, The lazy Geek on You Tube also started producing a whole series of NINA videos at that same time. Cuiv is a contributor to the development of NINA who’s originator is Stefan Berg. To learn some of NINA I started out just using the auto focus first and switching back to APT to control everything else. A bit counter intuitive maybe but it worked quite well for me even though doing that gained me little or nothing time wise. Then I started using the plate solving and adding in more of it’s features as I learned. Pretty soon I was no longer using APT. Automatic meridian flip kind of threw me at first. I never used it in APT or tried to understand it in SGP so I can’t compare the three methods. With NINA the mount actually is set just to make sure it tracks past the meridian enough so the mount control knows to slew back to the East side when give a slew command. Or optionally if you cannot go far enough past the meridian or need to stop because of tripod or pier you can. It just waits long enough for the object in the sky is far enough to the West side to allow NINA to do a slew command and move back to the East side again without the mount having a conflict with the slew command and the mount not moving. You set your mount to no meridian flip and just to stop as a safety feature just past your normal flip point in case something like a computer failure. Actually it’s a quite simple solution and method. |
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Frédéric Auchère i asked a similar question on Apt forum I wanted to take a set number of exposures the park but after first exposure it parked, ivo ‘s answer was Make one more line with exposure duration 0s which to execute the command Hi David, Back after a few months with no time for AP ... Not sure how to make that work. Do you mean add one extra zero second exposure at the end of the sequence? Since I'm not using filters or anything my plan is super simple, a single line of N exposures. I would really like to solve this as it is really the only drawback of APT for me now. And since I have to check that the flip goes well, it would save me some sleep CS Frédéric |
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All I did was in the editor was to duplicate the first line of exposures then edit the second line Length of exposure to 0 seconds , making sure you use the park command , when you load the imaging plan second line should have a little apostrophe next to 0’ do a dummy test during daytime to check Plan using a short exposure for first line like 1/4000 your only looking to see if plan works so move mount away from park position , initiate plan then see if it parks , works a treat for me . dave |
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| My problem is meridian flips and not parking but that may work, I'll give it a try! |
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Then just add a line with 0 exposure will rectify your problem that’s what happened to me , took first sub then parked ,using second line 0 exposure Solved the issue . dave |
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I had been using APT for a year or so. When I upgraded my OTAs to include a Moonlite focuser I found that APT fell short. It did not have a useful autofocusing routine. NINA had a fantastic one which has made NINA very useful to me and I haven't looked back. That having been said, if you don't have or use a motorized focuser, then APT is perfect. Actually, I really miss one feature that was my bread and butter in APT...the ability to point and go...that's GOTO++ where you plate solve an image and then click on any part of it that you want to be the new center. Usually, after I slew to my target and take an exposure it is in the FOV, but nowhere near center. I can then click on a part of it that I want to be the center and the mount moves there iteratively until it achieves center to within a given threshold. I don't know why NINA does not have this feature, but if it did I would be super happy. Clear skies! |
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John Kroon: Apt is currently working on multi star focusing I think it’s working with ccd cameras and awaiting dslr update to multi star focusing , I currently use a deepskydad auto focus unit with a dslr and works well better when dslr multi star released which I think is penned in for next release update, you can also autofocus a canon lens with Apt which I never realised until recently. |
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Thought I would throw my pennies worth in. I started out using APT several months ago and switched to NINA 2 months ago. Why? As I was getting better at AP I was better able to make use of my imaging time with planning which meant switching objects as one got too low in the sky or behind an object. I found with APT you can automate the change of targets but it’s using scripts which I found fiddly in APT so looked into NINA which is highly automated in comparison. At first wasn’t used to the UI but it grows on you and now I really like it. There are great facilities for searching and framing objects and you can do some very specific sequencing of tasks for great automation, in a very user friendly way. I think both can do most automotive tasks but NINA makes easier through it easy to use UI and there is no scripting. Finally the community is amazing behind NINA and there always really good significant “stable” releases, obit is constantly being developed.............. plus the price is spot on CS |
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| I've never actively used APT myself, but friend of mine is using it for imaging on two setups and I've often used APT on his rigs. While it's totally fine for beginners and DSLR users which he is, I think NINA offers a bit more for experienced users with dedicated astro cameras. I've used MaxIm DL in past and now happy to switch to NINA from this year. |
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Frédéric Auchère:Frédéric Auchère: I do not know anything about APT, but if it uses ASCOM/EQMOD the flip might be turned on in the limits section. It might be worth a check to see if it’s off there as well. Just a thought 😁 |
