Sunday, December 15, 2013
NexRemote Again
The winds
are blowing, the clouds are scudding, and the rain is falling. So, once again,
I haven’t been able to get out and give RSpec
a good try. Or fire up the Mallincam Junior Pro. Or see how well Coelix will go to its go-tos.
Not that me and Miss D. were stuck at home without any astronomy related activities on tap. Unk had the high honor and distinct privilege of being invited up to give a talk at the Atlanta Astronomy Club’s Holiday Dinner. Not only was it nice to spend time with old friends and make some new ones, the food was purty derned good too.
Weather or no weather, the Little Old Blog from Chaos Manor South rolls on, and it didn't take too much cogitating to come up with a topic for this Sunday. This one is sorta like The Beatles Again in that this is territory I've covered before. I've told y’all about Celestron's NexRemote software a time or three over the years, but I feel compelled to do so again for a couple of reasons. One is that I still get lots of questions about how you install and use the program, and, indeed, even ones like, “What the hell is it good for, Unk? Why is it better than just sending my scope on gotos with Cartes du Ciel? Huh?” The other reason? We’ll get to that eventually...
Not that me and Miss D. were stuck at home without any astronomy related activities on tap. Unk had the high honor and distinct privilege of being invited up to give a talk at the Atlanta Astronomy Club’s Holiday Dinner. Not only was it nice to spend time with old friends and make some new ones, the food was purty derned good too.
Weather or no weather, the Little Old Blog from Chaos Manor South rolls on, and it didn't take too much cogitating to come up with a topic for this Sunday. This one is sorta like The Beatles Again in that this is territory I've covered before. I've told y’all about Celestron's NexRemote software a time or three over the years, but I feel compelled to do so again for a couple of reasons. One is that I still get lots of questions about how you install and use the program, and, indeed, even ones like, “What the hell is it good for, Unk? Why is it better than just sending my scope on gotos with Cartes du Ciel? Huh?” The other reason? We’ll get to that eventually...
I suppose I
ought to explain to you greenhorns what NexRemote
is and what makes it different from other astro-ware. It’s simple enough to sum
up: NexRemote
takes the firmware running on the NexStar hand control and puts it in your PC
(ain’t no Mac version, sorry y’all). Let’s underline that: NexRemote
is the NexStar hand control, just
executing on a Windows PC rather than on the little dedicated HC computer.
“Well, what
good is that, Unk?” There are several good things afoot, Skeezix. If you have the need to run your telescope remotely, NexRemote
is a godsend. You don’t have to mess with networking PCs; you have a hand
control right on your screen, a hand control that can do anything the hardware
HC can do, since, again, it is the NexRemote
hand control.
How do you
hook this virtual HC to a non-virtual scope? There are three ways to
do that. You can use a standard Celestron serial cable between your computer
and the serial port on the base of the (hardware) hand control. In this
configuration, the hardware HC doesn’t do
anything; it just provides a path to connect the NexRemote HC to the scope. Since you will in essence have connected
two hand controls to the telescope, pushing any buttons other than direction
buttons on the hardware HC will make the scope become badly confused. So don’t do
that.
Way Two is
to leave the dadgum hardware HC at home. To do that you use Celestron’s “PC”
cable, a.k.a. “programming cable” (different from the standard Celestron serial
cable), which is connected between the laptop and the mount’s “PC port.” Alas,
if you own a CG5 or a CGEM, you ain’t got
no PC port. In the past, you could provide a PC port for your mount with
Celestron’s Auxiliary Port Accessory. Unfortunately, they have discontinued it.
Even if they hadn’t, I found it will not work with the new Celestron VX mount.
The final
way? Use Celestron’s wireless SkyQ link, which is designed to allow cell phones to
communicate with Celestron telescopes. You can download software that permits
you to use the Link with a PC rather a phone so you can establish
communications between mount and NexRemote over
the air. This is still purty new, but it works reliably it could be
awful cool, y’all. No hardware HC required, and one less cable for me to trip over.
“Well,
that’s nice an’ all, I reckon, but how the hell do you get the scope goto
aligned with NexRemote? Run back and
forth between the laptop and the scope? Tote the dadgum computer out to the SCT?”
You could do that, but that’s not the optimum way to align using NR. The
optimum way involves one of the very best things about the program: it allows you to use a wireless gamepad
(joystick) to slew the scope, which, in effect, becomes your wireless hand control.
As you all
may know, Uncle Rod is all too (in)famous for wrapping cables around the scope
in the dark, tripping over ‘em, and cussing those dadburned too-short hand control cords. For a
long time, I hoped Celestron would come out with a wireless hand paddle. Meade made an abortive attempt at that with
the wireless Autostar, but it just didn’t work right. I finally figured out
Celestron hadn’t tried the same thing because NexRemote already gave you that capability.
Plug a
wireless gamepad into the laptop and you can align the scope using the
joystick. Do you still have to run back to the laptop to mash “Enter,” “Align,”
etc.? No. You can map the gamepad’s buttons to hand control buttons. My
Logitech Wireless Wingman has everything from slewing speed to “tours” assigned
to its controls. There are enough buttons and triggers on the Logitech so I can purty much do anything I want from the gamepad.
 |
| Forgetful Unk wrote the button functions on the gamepad... |
The best
thing, though, is being able to move the scope with a joystick. The action is
so much better than those lousy little N/S/E/W buttons of the real deal. You
can tell NR to only assign north, south, east, and west to the joystick, or you
can have the scope move in whichever direction you push the stick. I find just
N/S/E/W more intuitive, but being able to move the scope north-northwest with
the joystick, for example, is cool too.
So how do
you make this goodness work with NexRemote?
If you have a genu-wine Logitech Wireless Wingman or Wingman II, it is plug-and-play.
Plug the wireless receiver into the laptop, let the drivers load the first time
you do that, select the joystick with a right mouse click on the NexRemote settings screen, and you are
good to go.
“I like the
idear, Unk, but it looks like Logitech has discontinued them joysticks.” I know
for a fact you can still find the Wireless Wingman and Wingman 2 on the
pea-picking eBay, but if’n you can’t get one, NexRemote’s joystick.ini file can be edited fairly easily to make
it work with other gamepads. The information on how to do that is in the
program’s extensive help files, and there is plenty more help available on the NexRemote Yahoogroup. Other gamepads
will most assuredly work. Hell, I know people using Xbox 360 controllers with NexRemote.
That is just
the start of the Good Things NexRemote
brings to the table. Got a mount that didn’t come with GPS, and don’t want to
give Celestron two-hundred fraking dollars for one? That’s where your Unk was
at when he got his CG5 mount. GPS is a nice-to-have for a German equatorial,
but it is hardly a must-have and was not worth the money Celestron wanted for
their CN-16 accessory. I resigned myself to entering date/time/lat/lon at the
start of each session.
Till I found
out NexRemote comes with an add-on
program, NexGPS, that lets you to use
any GPS receiver with a NMEA serial output as your scope’s GPS. While surveying
the dealer tables at the Possum Swamp Hamfest one spring, Unk ran across a
little Cobra GPS receiver for about 40 bucks. A few extra dollars for the
serial cable for this receiver, and my CG5 had GPS as long as I was using NexRemote.
 |
| NexGPS |
My cheap
Cobra worked just as well as the CN-16 and was actually easier to use. When you
get to the observing site, fire up the laptop, connect your GPS receiver to it,
and start NexGPS. It will get a fix
from your receiver. When it has that fix, you can save the position as an
observing site for future use. NexGPS
lets you preserve up to four locations, which is
more than enough for me most of the time. Once you have your site saved, you
don’t need to hook up the GPS receiver again the next time you observe from
there. Actually, if you are within 60-miles of one of your saved locations, you
can use that and not worry about the receiver. How do you select one of these
saved sites? On the NR set up screen, the
right-click menu has a “select site” choice.
How about
time? NexRemote uses the time/time
zone/DST data from the laptop. If you want it to be super-accurate, you can
have NexGPS update the PC clock with
GPS SV time when you have the GPS receiver connected. That can be a good thing
if you don’t use your laptop often, and it never gets to update its time from
the Internet.
What else?
Do you like tours? I ain’t that big
on the guided tours the hardware HC has. Its picks are invariably a run of the
mill best-of-the-best and not usually /always things I’d choose to observe. NexRemote has you covered with another
add-on, NexTour. NexTour is like a mini-planning program that will enable you to
assemble a list of objects from the NGC/IC, the Caldwell list, the Abell galaxy cluster catalog, and the Abell planetary nebula catalog. The magic comes when you have a finished list of objects
you want to see. You can save it as a tour that can be loaded into the virtual
hand control via the right click menu.
NexTour is excellent, and may
mean a lot of y’all won’t have recourse to using an external planning program
with NexRemote. If you are like Unk,
however, chasing the dim and outré, you will still need to use a program like SkyTools 3 or Deep Sky Planner with NexRemote.
How can you set up SkyTools so you
can click on its objects and send your scope on gotos? There ain’t no way to
plug a serial cable into a virtual hand control.
 |
| NexTour |
You use NexRemote’s Virtual Port. There is a second pull-down menu on the setup screen below
the one that selects the computer’s serial port. This second pull-down allows
you to choose a VIRTUAL serial port. Pick a virtual port number different from your
PC’s actual serial port (I usually use 6), and you are done. Once you are
aligned, just tell SkyTools or your
program of choice to connect to the mount using the com port number you
selected for the virtual port. I enter “6” in SkyTools 3, and it connects to the scope pretty as you please, just
as if it were hooked to the hardware hand control.
Unk’s
history with NexRemote goes back almost
to the beginning of the program, when it was just the project of a couple of
talented programmers, Ray St. Denis and Andre Paquette, a project they were
calling “hcAnyhwhere” before
Celestron picked it and them up. Unk was a beta tester, and was happy to do
that, even if he didn’t see much need for such a program.
In fact,
about all I did with hcAnywhere other
than checking it for bugs, was set it up in the backyard with my NexStar 11 so
I could try out a new Celestron alignment routine I was curious about, SkyAlign. SkyAlign worked just fine,
and so did hcAnywhere, and that was good,
and there I left things for a long while.
What got me
to NexRemoting seriously? One day, I noticed a Wireless Wingman gamepad on the fraking
eBay for a few dollars. Thought it might be fun to try with NexRemote. If NR still didn’t ring my
chimes, I figgered the Logitech would come in handy for playing Quake on the cotton-picking computer.
When that
Wingman arrived, I was astounded at how much nicer a quality joystick was for
scope control than four crummy little buttons. But that alone wasn’t enough to turn
me into a NexRemote fanatic. That
took two things, the Stellacam 2 and DSRSG.
 |
| Setting the virtual port |
I bought my
Stellacam deep sky video camera in 2005, but it didn’t start getting lots of
time under the stars till two years later at good old Camp Ruth Lee. I had a
ball out there at the 2007 Deep South Regional Star Gaze, hitting Hickson Group
after Hickson Group. My NexStar 11 and the Stellacam were, amazingly, able to
show me all the members of the galaxy groups I could see on the Palomar
Observatory Sky Survey plates. I’d look up the next target on my (printed)
observing list, walk out to the scope, punch in the NGC or IC number of the
brightest member, and go back to the monitor to marvel at all the little
fuzzies.
Yeah, I was
having a ball, but it occurred to me that since I was doing all my observing with
a video monitor under a tent canopy where I was relatively warm and cozy, it
didn’t make much sense to have to walk out to the scope all the time. I could have
avoided that by using my hand control extension cable, but what about NexRemote? With NR could sit at the monitor and run the
scope with that wonderful wireless joystick. And I could use the virtual port
feature to connect SkyTools to NexRemote and click my way to the Hicksons without a paper list. I fired up the
laptop, connected to NexRemote and
never looked back.
I started liking NexRemote on that evening in 2007, but I didn’t start loving it till 2009, when I was just on
the cusp of beginning The Herschel Project. I still didn’t use NexRemote every single time I observed.
There wasn’t any AC power at the club dark site, and my old Toshiba laptop with
its high-speed desktop Pentium chip would run through even a deep cycle marine
battery in a right quick hurry. Chiefland had plenty of AC outlets on the
field, however, so when I was contemplating my first summertime expedition Down
Chiefland Way in July of ‘09, I decided I’d use the laptop and NexRemote the whole time.
Actually I
didn’t really expect to use NexRemote
down in Chiefland. Hell, I didn’t really expect to use my telescope. As y’all can imagine, summertime weather in Florida
ain’t always conducive to astronomy. I knew I was taking a chance, and might
not see a thing. Sometimes I do get lucky, though, and for once I hit it just
right. I have never seen better skies at the CAV. Not in fall, not in Winter.
The False Comet, NGC 6231, just blazed away on those hot July nights—like I’d
never seen it outside of southwest deserts.
 |
| Downtown Chiefland, FL... |
I set up Big
Bertha, the NexStar 11, about 8-feet from the EZ-Up tailgating canopy and ran
cables for NexRemote (PC cable) and video back to the canopy. Under there, I had a little portable
DVD player for viewing the videos, a DVD recorder for capturing sequences, and
the Toshiba laptop for telescope control via NR.
When the
stars began to wink on, I powered up the SCT, video cam, monitor, and computer
and got goto aligned with NR. Which wasn’t much different from a hardware HC
alignment. Go out to scope, center the first alignment star in the finder
with the Wingman, walk back to canopy, center star on video display, repeat for
one more star, and I was done. After that, I didn’t need to go out to the
telescope again till it was time to shut down at the end of the run.
“But Uncle
Rod, but Uncle Rod, how did you know when it was time to push Enter and Align
without looking at the display on the virtual HC on the laptop screen?” Well,
there’s one thing I forgot to mention: NexRemote talks. Yep, you can enable the Microsoft Mary (or Mike) voices so
you get audio prompts, “Center star in the eyepiece and press Align!” This
ain’t just glitz; it is genuinely useful. How is the voice quality?
Good. Mary’s pronunciations got a little squirrely once I upgraded to Windows 7
64-bit (at the end of the night she now says “shooting down” instead of
“shutting down.”), but are always more than understandable.
 |
| A July Afternoon on the Billy Dodd Field... |
That turned
out to be a big benefit of Unk’s new wave video and NexRemote observing system. If I am comfy under a tent canopy, I can
keep on rocking real late despite my rather advanced age. On otherwise
comfortable warm summer nights, there’s heavy dew—down here, anyhow—and being
wet with dew is just about as bad as being cold for sapping your energy. Dry
under the canopy I can go long past the time when the young folks start leaving
the field. Cold? Sides on canopy, Black Cat catalytic heater at my feet, and I
am still chasing fuzzies when the younguns are all tucked-in. Let me also say
astrovideo (now with my wonderful Mallincams)
allows me to go deeper and see much more than I ever dreamed possible.
Have I made further improvements to my video and NexRemote
“system”? Well, I added JMI's (excellent) Motofocus to the NexStar 11 and my older C8, Celeste, but that is about it. I have occasionally thought about putting a video finder on the
scope. A second vidcam with a wide angle lens and I could get the scope aligned
without walking out to it at all. In truth, that sounds like gilding the lily.
It’s just not a big hassle to align on two stars with Bertha at the beginning
of the evening—or even on the six the VX requires.
By the way, yes, I still
observe visually, if not that often. But even when I go visual, I go visual with
NexRemote. It is more pleasant to use
than the hardware hand control. Since I invariably have a laptop in the field
anyway—I’d no more be without SkyTools
and Deep Sky Planner than I’d be
without NR—there is no reason not to.
That other
reason I wanted to talk about NR this morning?
It looks like Celestron is out to
spoil our NexRemote party. It appears they have stopped developing the
program. If so, that means no new firmware builds will be added to NR as new
mounts and scopes appear. Nor will the program transition to the new NexStar
Plus hand control (though I am not sure that is a bad thing). NexRemote will slowly fade away.
What makes
me think Celestron has given up on NexRemote?
In addition to comments by Celestron folks that have been passed on to me, as
above they have discontinued the vital PC port accessory and are not selling a
replacement. Even more concerning, they now give the program’s license number
away for free. I am beginning to think they’d just as soon not bother with NR
anymore. I’ve been told the folks in California are now referring to NexRemote as “legacy software.”
 |
| Bridge of the starship U.S.S. Possum Swamp... |
Horse hockey. NexRemote
works as well with my new VX mount as it does with my 12-year-old NexStar GPS. A
little tweaking, maybe a version that
will work with the new SkySensor setup, and NR would be ready to go for
another decade. This software is just too useful for us to allow it to sink
into the sunset without protest. How can we protest? If you like NR, TELL
CELESTRON. I don’t have an email contact for them that I feel at liberty to
share with y’all, but you can slip ‘em a note (or maybe even give ‘em a call)
via this page.
Will that do
any good? I don’t know, but it might. If there is anything right-thinking
companies will sit up and take notice about, it is comments by their customers.
One person won’t do it. Nor will two or three. But 50? 50 people singing the praises of NexRemote? Friends, they may thinks it's a movement, and that’s what it will be, muchachos, the NexRemote anti-masacree movement.
Next Time:
DO NOT FREAK-OUT NEXT SUNDAY, y’all. The blog will not be updated Sunday
morning. As has been our custom for years, that edition will instead appear on
Christmas Eve night. It will likely be a little more sentimental than usual, too.
See y’all then…
Comments:
<< Home
Really great write up Unk!! Cleared up a couple of questions that I had. Also made me a bit angry about the fate of NR. I just started using all the time a few months ago and don't want to lose it!! Especially since getting the SkyQ link up and running. I've also downloaded and payed for NexHub as well. Would really be a bummer if I wasted that money on something that is no longer supported. I'm planning to send Celestron a message along with a follow up phone call telling them that NR is a wonderful program that should be a priority for them to continue to support and upgrade.
Again, great post and I look forward to the next installment.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!
Again, great post and I look forward to the next installment.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!
# posted by 
: 9:41 AM
: 9:41 AM
I use nexremote exclusively now, due to your first post about it. I even had a friend build me a box with the circuit inside that replaces the hand controller... Direct from mount to PC for my cg5. Shame they are getting rid of it, especially after buying up the project. If they were nice, they'd open source the software or something so it could be improved and kept up to date.
Heck, today I even bought a bluetooth gamepad that I plan to set up for use with it.
Heck, today I even bought a bluetooth gamepad that I plan to set up for use with it.
# posted by : 12:22 PM
: 12:22 PM
Thanks for the great post Rod. Although I am not a Celestron user, the write-up is exactly what I do (when I have time nowadays) with my EQ-6 mount and SynScan controller (and mallincam). The fortunate part about it is that the software that is similar to NexRemote is open source (its called EQ-MOD), and it's authors are constantly upgrading it with new features as suggested by users (via a Yahoo group). The ability to move your telescope with a gamepad is one of the coolest things, and I think when we are at public events, the kids are more impressed at that then actually lookng through the telescope. :-)
Right on, Dave. I'm also an EQMODer when I am using my Atlas. Which I will probably be doing more frequently in the future--I am thinking of moving my NexStar 11 OTA to it--the fork is just getting to be too much for me to handle. ;-)
Thanks - great write up. I just installed my NexRemote with latest software from Celestron but the direction buttons don't work from my PC while they do work with the hand control. Is there some trick I am missing??
Some tips:
Make sure you are using a good serial usb connector--Keyspan is best.
Make sure you have the latest version of NexRemote (from the Celestron website)...
Make sure you are using a good serial usb connector--Keyspan is best.
Make sure you have the latest version of NexRemote (from the Celestron website)...
When using your motofocus, how far are you able to set your controller from the scope under the canopy for a long distance?
Mike
Mike
# posted by : 1:43 PM
: 1:43 PM
Typically 15-20' Mike, but I believe I could go twice as far. The power for the Motofocus is in the hand control--batteries--but I don't notice any problems with long extension cables.
Post a Comment
<< Home
