Also keep in mind of you bought a scope and the camera and tracker and hooked it up to a laptop. It does the same thing.

Years ago, when I was first considering getting into astrophotography, I had an equatorial mount for my telescope and I tried steering it with Stellarium running on a laptop. Via a plug-in. And a bluetooth dongle connected to the mount. With a special driver that sent the serial commands over the bluetooth connection to the mount… It worked, but getting it set up and aligned took ages, and if any part of that chain glitched I had to start over. I never even got as far as adding a camera to the mix, LOL. These smart scopes have everything integrated into one self-contained package.

This is definitely making things more accessible for me. I guess I’m just curious how the grognards of the hobby react to these developments.