From: "milton_aupperle" <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: July 13, 2012 2:35:42 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Astro IIDC 4.09 Beta 0 issue

Hi Folks;

I found a bug in the 4.09.00 beta 0 release for people using "Measure Differential Photometrics..". I suspect no one but me uses it, so this likely isn't a big issue.

Basically the Date - Time and JDN values are not being updated when we write the information out to the text files. So they stay the same for each sample. It's fixed in 4.09.00 beta 1, but I have not finished the other changes I am making yet so I can't post a bug fix for it. You can use the 4.08.00 version of Astro IIDC which does work fine.

One "positive" result of my MBP 17" hard drive media failures (the old and new drive has disk errors with bad blocks causing data loss) is that it uncovered an issue with Astro IIDC when stacking. If Astro IIDC detected an error when reading the movie frames for measuring sharpness, it currently stops the alignment process and gracefully cleaned up everything. However it would not notify the user that there was an issue with movie corruption in a warning window - which is my fault.

Since I'm fed up with Apples lack of Q&A using crap components (it will only get worse as Apple shifts more resources away from the Mac), I have come up with a methodology  that may allow you to work with some of the movie frames on corrupted hard drives.

Basically Astro IIDC will now keep the data it can read from the movie and allow you to stack and align it. I am still testing this out, but so far it looks like it will work , as long a the movie atom structure is intact. If the media failure happens in the atom structure (which indicates where frames are, what the duration per frame is, what the media is etc.), then there is basically nothing one can do and it's toast. The movie will not be viewable in QuickTime player either.

I have also decided that an Apple script command to set the Tracking Calibration values is simply not going to work (i.e. cumbersome, error prone etc.). What I have decide to do is to add two buttons to the Tracking sheet which will allow you to "Save" and "Load" the calibration data. Basically once you do a tracking calibration, you can click on the "Save" button to save those parameters in an XML preference file. In your next tracking session, you can simply click the "Load" button to reload those settings from the same file (you won't choose a file, it gets selected automagically) . Note that if you change the optical path or rotate the camera or forget to set the Guide Speed in the hand controller, then loaded settings will cause tracking to be horrible - so it follows the GIGO principal.

Have a great weekend..

Milton Aupperle