Quantcast
Channel: Main Sequence Software - Latest posts
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 52138

Autofocus, Plate solving, and guiding

$
0
0

I've been playing around with a trial copy of SGP for 6 days and have run into a situation a couple of times.

When the sequence starts, SGP slews the telescope to the target and runs plate solving to center. One issue I had was that my telescope was not in focus yet meaning that I only had a few stars to work with and plate-solving failed. Wouldn't it be better to run the autofocus routine before the centering routine?

The other issue I had was a slightly off balance OTA was causing streaks in the image. Obviously, this isn't SGP's fault and it definitely needed to be corrected before continuing but, I would think that activating guiding before platesolve capture would have helped a great deal because I could have received a message from PhD chiming like there's no tomorrow before I commit to a few minutes of platesolving a half billion little streaks.

I also wonder if a skip option could be added to the sequencing. For instance, a couple of nights ago, I had built a sequence to run overnight with multiple targets. Well, one of my targets was in the trees when SGP started on that target's events. However, the next target in the list was available and could have the option to run while the other target had some additional time to clear my neighbor's forest. I would think that you would want this on a per-target basis so, if the target can't get a lock, maybe in some situations, I want it to retry every ten minutes until it's ready and other times, I want to skip it and just read a dialog box in the morning.

At any rate, pretty cool software you've got there.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 52138

Trending Articles