Here are some tips for Astro Snap users:

• Read the excellent documentation. It contains some useful tips so if you just use the software by playing around you will miss out on some features.

• On your first night of using it, try out most of its features.

• While waiting for Mars to come up, play around with the features on stars. This is to gain experience. When Mars then comes up, you are in a better position to take images rather than only then starting to learn Astro Snap.

• Go through all the tabs when you select the options menu option. Set everything correctly to help the program work correctly.

• Do not make your detection zone larger than your imaging zone. Otherwise if the large detection zone hits the side of the ccd chip, the display (image capturing) zone will cause your image to move off the zone too quickly. To understand this, make the detection zone as large as you can. You will see the problem if this large zone gets to the edge of the screen.

• A larger detection zone also causes a slightly slower streaming frame capture rate.

• If the integration box is selected, single frames are not written away to disk. So be careful. If the display zone is not been updated, you will not get new bmp frames written to disk. The SAME frame gets written over and over.

• The autofocussing works great on stars.

• I only have a 14 inch computer monitor. A larger monitor would be helpful - to show the integration window side-by-side with the main window. Setting the webcam settings using the Video-source menu option also blocks the view too much.

• Since you might be using the image selection and focus functionality the program responds a bit slower on slews than other programs you might be used to. So you have to practice accurate slewing at this lower speed. TIP: If your image gets close to the screen/ccd chip move it away before it gets too close since there will be a delay before your slew is acted upon.