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Welcome to EQMac

This site is the home for the EQMac software, designed to control Skywatcher and certain Atlas equatorial mounts directly from your Mac. Here you will find some basic guides on configuring and using the software, as well as downloads.

If you have any requests, questions, or comments about the software, please use the contact form in the menu, or you can find me on Stargazers' Lounge as OzDave.

OS X Mavericks Users - Beware of App Nap

I have recently experienced a lot of serious problems with various Astronomy software on the Mac since upgrading to OS X Mavericks. I have not figured out whether there is an impact on EQMac, but my opinion is that it could definitely adversely affect at least pulse guiding. Here is a link to an article I posted on the issues and how to work around the problems. I will be releasing an App Nap aware version of EQMac as soon as I can find the time.

EQMac v1.3.2 beta1 Released!

I've just posted a BETA release of EQMac fixing a number of bugs including problematic gamepads and adding a new Meridian Flip feature. Full details are available in the file downloads area. As this release has not been extensively tested, please take care and let me know if any strange problems are discovered.

Gamepad Not Working?

Recently some people have been reporting that they can't get their gamepads to work at all with EQMac. To try and help these people out, I've made a small application to dump out some data about your gamepad that you can send to me. I you do that, I will hopefully be able to make your device work with EQMac.

Here is a page with instructions on what to do: Gamepad Troubleshooting

Pointing Model Update

I have been spending some time recently testing and debugging the new 3-point star alignment code following the 1.3.1 release. I've got the code to the point where it will compute a correction based on 3 nearby alignment points and it will correctly slew the telescope to the corrected position with a counterweights-down slew. So that is relatively good news. The not so good news is that the corrected position isn't good enough and typically doesn't fall into the FOV of typical eyepieces. A 1-point slew produces a much more accurate result.

3-point Alignment Bugs

BUG ALERT

It seems that there is an error in one of the numerical routines associated with the 3-point alignment algorithms. This causes the slew adjustments to go wrong and results in counter-weights-up slews to the vicinity of the target you wanted. This is not desirable behaviour obviously and so at this time I recommend that people turn the 3-point algorithm off (in the Align window) until I can fix the issue.

New Documentation Available

I have been a bit lax about providing documentation for many of the newer features of EQMac. I am trying to correct this at present and you will find several new pages on configuring various aspects of EQMac within the Documentation section of the site. As always, if you have any questions, please contact me directly or leave a message in one of the forums on the site.

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