Thank you Jared - this is very good news. Your earlier reply on Oct 14 implied the solution was working fine and there was no reply to my explanations for why it still was not working - so I didn’t know if you realized the problem was still there.
In my case imaging with sct the lack of accuracy meant I could not use automatic centering in sgp at all. If the field is small enough that the residual errors strongly alter the composition - then the centering simply becomes unusable. And without centering you can’t do multi-target sequences. And you can’t do mosaics. As a result, all my work with sgp has involved manually centering a target - and then imaging that one target.
This all changed recently when I started doing hyperstar imaging. In that case the centering error is more negligible and I was able to make much better use of SGP’s features - many for the first time. I used the mosaic tool for the first time and found it to be extremely well implemented. I had heard people rave about it - but didn’t realize how good it was until I tried it.
So if you implement the centering routine so that it works with cge-pro - it won’t be an incremental improvement - it will open a door for me and others to make use of features that were otherwise unavailable.
I look forward to trying the beta - but I want to clarify one thing. Yes - this landing error issue only affects the situations that trigger the automatic centering routine. And yes - there is no need to keep track of the landing offset - it can be thrown away once the target is centered. But in my case I do in fact value being able to solve/sync. That works just fine with my mount - and losing that feature is undesirable because it improves the pointing model locally - and keeps TheSky and any other software in sync with where the mount is pointing.
So I think users divide into two classes
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Their mounts don’t mind syncing - so solve/sync is fine - but use syncless centering for Auto Center and Center Here - because there is no reason not to - and some mounts require it. There is no inherent advantage to syncing the mount in the centering process.
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Their mounts should not ever be sync’d - so disable solve/sync - but still use syncless centering as in (1).
I realize the syncless centering should be tested more to make sure it works - but I think there is a way to avoid things being too complicated - and that is to use syncless centering by default - and disable solve/sync only for those mounts that can’t sync. I’m just trying to have a way that I can use syncless centering - but still be able to do solve/sync.
Thanks,
Frank