Comment by joshumax
13 hours ago
I used Astra on one of my old observatories (an aging Explora-Dome) and I can say it's definitely a very nice experience compared to "legacy" tools like ACP from DC3. That being said, however, it kind of sits on the lower end of functionality compared to existing commercial observatory control offerings like Starkeeper's Voyager platform, especially when it comes to advanced scheduling features and scripting. Still, for basic needs it's nice to have a decent open source alternative in a very niche ecosystem.
I just released Astra, so I'm impressed how quickly you got set up!
How do you feel about Alpaca in actual use? I've been skeptical about controlling something expensive with a REST api, not that I have anything to back up that feeling, but it always raised my eyebrow
It's been great. We've been operating with it at our observatories (SPECULOOS, ESO Paranal, Chile) for the past 2 years without issues that can be attributed to Alpaca. We had to modify the Alpyca library timeout from 5 to 60s (which Astra uses) given our legacy ASCOM drivers not being as compliant as they should be, but other than that it has worked well.