Thanks!!! and an issue

[Walter Knesel]

Hi,
First of all, I am a Linux person, and want to use windows as little as possible. Second, I have been an amateur  astronomer for over 20 yrs. and 
an astrophotographer for about 2 years. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU !!!!! for building a astrophotography platform that does not rely 
on Windows / ascom. And really works, and does not make me feel like a 2nd class citizen. 

I do like that I have been able to put indilib on a raspberry pi, runs my zwo devices, I can use my laptop in my house (warm) wirelessly. Save the pics 
on a pi flash drive or on my laptop. I do use windows deep sky stacker, would like to move that off windows.....  and I can use Gimp 2.10+ on Linux instead of 
photoshop / pix insight / etc.  I know stellar mate is out there, like building my own, and you have kept me out of an ASI air which means I could buy a non-zwo camera.

Love it.
I did run into something recently that was disappointing. Simply, because I did not do any alignment (or plate solve in particular), pointed the scope at the eclipse moon directly.I did get a preview picture (fits) of the moon, but I found I could not save any of them, because it had no world coordinates, ie. save would not work because the fits picture 
did not have and could not be plate solved to get those coordinates. I understand it wanting to complain about data it does not have. My complaint is that it needs to find a way 
to save the file anyway, no matter how problems it has. I realize a read-only file system would be a show stopper. But it should work if it can't get some / all the file header info 
it wants. 

My scenario is that I live with clouds, they stop me often enough. On this night, it was somewhat broken clouds in parts of the sky. By the time I really wanted to polar align, 
the clouds blocked that, essentially for the time I wanted to take photos. But I could crudely get past that (home position roughly pretty good). I had an optical, not camera, 
finder scope, and could get to the moon when clouds were not too heavy. Seeing stars however, was not possible. So plate solving was simply not going to work. So like I said,I could get a preview picture, but could not save it (always got the no coordinates error popup). You might tell me that if I had scheduled a single shot and told it where to save, that might have worked. I realized later that 
if I had been determined, I could have saved the whole preview window and clipped the picture of it with gimp later. But I really want preview save to work, and I think you all 
would too. I don't know but maybe the same problem might exist if somebody wanted to take preview snaps of the sun with a solar filter? I also understand if I had a DSLR 
as the camera, this would not be a problem, but I am one of the people who don't, so I really needed this to work.
If there is other software that would work with ekos and let me save the photo, I am interested, but I currently doubt that kind of integration currently exists. 

Thanks again, I really appreciate all the work that has been done and is still going,Wally Knesel

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