Field guide

The short version of the operating manual: what to do, in order, on a night that works — and the three or four things that quietly ruin one.

Before you go out

Most failed nights are decided indoors. These take ten minutes and save hours.

Put the telescope outside thirty to sixty minutes early. On a Schmidt-Cassegrain this is not optional: while the tube is warmer than the air, the air inside it moves, and no focus you find will hold.
Charge both batteries — the camera's and the mount's. A warning at a quarter charge is not much use at two in the morning.
Turn the camera's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off. In wireless mode a Canon will not accept a USB session at all.
Quit the manufacturer's own utility completely. Only one program can own the camera; if theirs has it, Cyclope cannot.
Tie a loop of slack cable to the tripod. On an alt-azimuth mount the cable ruins more frames than the sky does.

Setting up

Connect the mount and choose its port. The status strip along the top names the transport once it is connected.
Do the alignment. Two stars is the minimum, three in a different part of the sky is what turns a fit into a model worth trusting. Without it, go to will not land. With the camera running, Auto Align does the whole of it for you: it asks once, then chooses the fields, points at each, photographs it and builds the model. Check the telescope can swing freely before you confirm — it knows your safe limits, not your garden.
Start the camera and its live view.
Set the location once. Everything that follows — where objects are, when they set, how fast the field turns — is computed from it.

Centre stars the same way every time. Approach at a slow speed and finish with the same two directional controls. A mount has backlash, and approaching consistently from one side is what keeps it out of the pointing model.

Getting focus

Never focus on the object you came to photograph. A nebula or a galaxy is faint and diffuse and has nothing in it to focus on. Focus on a bright star at a similar altitude, then go to the target. Focus does not change when the telescope turns — only as the tube cools.

At a typical focal ratio the entire range that counts as sharp is under a twentieth of a millimetre of focuser travel. That is why the eye is not enough and why Cyclope gives you a number instead.

Point at a genuinely bright star. A live view shows the brighter stars only — not any star.
Set the live view for the dark. Its exposure and sensitivity are separate from the capture settings, and left at daylight values they show nothing at all on a dark sky. This catches everyone once.
Find the star at 1× before zooming. At 10× the field is a tiny fraction of the sky and the star is probably not in it.
Start the focus measurement and turn slowly. The reading falls to a minimum and rises again; the minimum is focus. Cyclope also says which way you are going.
On a Schmidt-Cassegrain, finish turning in the same direction every time. The mirror has play, and reversing lets it settle somewhere else.

With a hand focuser, use a Bahtinov mask. Cyclope reads one: bring the central spike's offset to zero. It gives a geometric answer where a number alone flickers with the seeing. Masks are inexpensive, and this is the single best few euros in the hobby.

Refocus as the night cools — every three-quarters of an hour, or after two or three degrees of temperature drop.

Start with the Moon

The Moon is a better first target than any deep-sky object: it is bright enough that exposure is easy, it shows immediately whether the focus and the tracking are right, and it rewards a first night rather than testing your patience.

Use a short exposure — the point is to stop the atmosphere, not to collect light.
Focus on the terminator, the line between light and shadow, where the detail is.
Shoot a burst of a few hundred frames and keep only the sharpest tenth. Cyclope scores them and stacks the ones where the air happened to be still, which is where lunar and planetary sharpness actually comes from.

Deep sky, honestly

On an alt-azimuth mount the sky turns slowly inside the frame while the telescope tracks. That, and not the mount's accuracy, is what limits a single exposure — and it gets worse the higher you point.

Where the object is	Field turns	Longest frame
Near the zenith	very fast	under a second
Due south, halfway up	fast	a few seconds
Due east or west	slowest	tens of seconds

Two consequences, and both invert the usual advice. Do not photograph an object when it is highest — photograph it when it lies east or west, at a moderate altitude. And expect to take many short frames rather than a few long ones. Cyclope computes the actual number for your telescope and shows it while you work.

What makes short frames add up

Turning each frame back before stacking. Without it, every star in the result is a short arc.
Dithering — moving the telescope slightly between frames, so the sensor's own hot pixels and dust do not land in the same place each time and survive the stacking.
Dark frames at the same exposure, gain and temperature, captured for you in a named set.

An equatorial mount removes the limit entirely. If the alt-azimuth ceiling is what stands between you and the picture you want, a wedge or an equatorial mount changes the order of magnitude of what you can photograph — far more than any change of camera. Cyclope tracks either kind.

Leaving it running

A run that nobody is watching has to do more than count frames. Before it starts, Cyclope states what it will do: how long, what hour it ends, how much disk it writes. Then it holds to the conditions you set.

Stop below an altitude — so the night does not end in two hundred frames of trees.
Stop at an hour — whatever remains.
Refocus every so many frames — because focus drifts as the telescope cools.
Park at the end — however the end comes.

Every one of those is written to the log with its reason, because nobody was there to see it happen.

With a hand focuser, a refocus pauses the run. It does not fail, and it does not carry on out of focus: it stops taking frames, says what fell due, and waits for you to turn the knob and press continue.

What it refuses

Every command to the mount passes the same limits, and one that would break them does not reach the telescope.

Driving anywhere near the Sun. Solar tracking stays locked until you confirm a certified full-aperture filter is fitted.
Moving outside the altitude and azimuth envelope you set — into the mount, the pier or the ground.
Continuing to track when the updates that keep it on target stop arriving.
Moving a parked mount until it is deliberately released.

The Sun will blind you and destroy the equipment. No software limit replaces a certified full-aperture filter, correctly fitted in front of the objective, checked before every use.

When something is wrong

What you see	Where to look
The whole lunar disc is white	Exposure. Apply the Moon preset and watch the exposure guard, which reports how much of the frame has burnt out.
The camera is not listed	Wireless mode still on, the manufacturer's utility still running, or a hub between the camera and the Mac.
Go to lands consistently off	The pointing model. Add a reference in that part of the sky.
The mount refuses to move	Park state, and the altitude and azimuth limits. Both are shown on the Observatory page.
Plate solving finds nothing	A solver needs its star database, which is a separate and large download. Cyclope distinguishes a missing program from a missing database and says which.
Stars are short arcs	Field rotation on an alt-azimuth mount. Shorten the frames, or turn each frame back before stacking.

For anything else, Cyclope exports a hardware diagnostic report — keep it with the enquiry.

Questions

The full operating manual is included with the application. For anything this guide does not answer, use the enquiry form and say what you observe with.