From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: December 12, 2006 9:25:24 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: New guide camera wanted

Hi Dale;

On 12-Dec-06, at 8:30 PM, Dale J Martin wrote:

Hi Milton,

I tried the binning tonight and that made a big difference, but the

clouds rolled after about 30 minutes......

I've been living in clouds or if it's clear with turbulence that causes +/- 20 arc second jumps and surface winds of up to 80 km winds now for the past 4 weeks. And the Jets stream has completely surrounded me on 3 sides some nights. Really awful skies this year.

Is there a way to implement the Camera Controls being active while

the Mount Control window is active but not Tracking?

Nope, not without a horrendous amount of work to implement it.

I've never really had the problems you describing about when I've used it for guiding, and I'm using a color Unibrain under light polluted skies with an el cheapo 80 mm Aperture 400 mm FL guider. Basically if you can see the star(s), then it can track it unless the star is jumping all over the place due to turbulence.

One feature that I would like implemented is if the guide star has

moved/or Astro IIDC has jumped to another star Astro IIDC would stop

guiding.

Astro IID doesn't track "stars", it tracks by calculating a brightness centroid. So it will never know if the star you started with is the same star it's tracking now. How it tracks especially with multiple stars is described in some detail on page 19 of the updated Astro IIDC 3.01.00 manual.

I leave the scope unattended once I start the imaging

session and a few times Astro IIDC as lost the guide star and the

mount has moved way off the target.

Well there really is nothing I can do that case. If the guide star drifts outside the FOV while it's obscured by clouds or trees or buildings or mount being bumped, there is no way to recover from it as we have no idea what direction the original star is now. All we know once it's uncovered or has drifted for long enough a time that that you have a new star in the FOV is that we need to make that star move it into the same position as the original star started at.

HTH..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com