EQMac

I have been working on some updates to EQMac over the Christmas break (yay finally!) and unfortunately I have discovered a number of serious faults with EQMac v2.x. By far the worst of these is a bug to do with date computation that impacts the calculation of Local Sidereal Time (LST), which in turn is needed for practically every positioning calculation that the application makes.

Beta3 fixes a bug that was preventing the app from running on earlier versions of OS X.

It also enables the pointing model feature which was disabled in earlier beta versions.

This release fixes a bug preventing connection with third party software such as Sky Safari.

Also in this release, the software will automatically check for updates and alert you if there is a new version available. You can also invoke this functionality manually using the EQMac menu item Check for updates...

I am pleased to announce, after considerable delay, that a new version of EQMac has finally been released. This release provides support for connecting to the mount via WiFi as well as Serial. To do this required a redevelopment of the backend driver so that different protocol transports could be plugged in. For the future it will also allow different types of mounts to be supported also. So it may be that we branch out from Skywatcher to support Celestron and other brands.

It has been quite a while since the last update of EQMac and this has mainly been due to work commitments over the last year or so. I have, however, been working slowly on EQMac v2.0 and now summer has arrived and some holidays, I've been able to test it a bit and hopefully I'll be able to release something soon. The new version of EQMac completely rewrites the low-level mount driver code so that it can support different backends and protocols more easily.

Late last year, I was fortunate enough to receive the support of Astro Devices, a company who sells a WiFi adapter product called Nexus-S for use with different mounts. When used with a Synscan EQ6 or HEQ5, it can plug directly to the mount's Synscan port and provides both EQDirect and WiFi support.