Hi all,
I know there is a button to automatically park the scope after a sequence is complete. Is there a way to do it once a guide star is lost? Last night a target got lost behind a building during a download. The guide star was lost, the program quit, and the download was stuck. I woke up this morning to have the scope pointing forlornly at the roof of my house.
Stuart
Hi Stuart,
I don’t think losing the guide star is the correct event for this scenario - the guide star could be lost behind some passing cloud and, if you have auto-recovery enabled, SGP would resume the sequence. You wouldn’t want to park the scope and lose the rest of the night’s imaging.
What you need is to park the scope when the target altitude declines to a certain value i.e. the altitude, in degrees, of the roof of your house at the point where the target crosses it. If you have a Skywatcher mount and are using EQMOD to interface between SGP and the mount, then you can set up the Horizon Limits in EQMOD which will automatically park the scope when it drops below your defined horizon. You can define a 360 degree horizon and so just set up once and it is good forever.
I think a better way, which will work for any mount, is to use SGP’s planning tools to specify an end-time for imaging a target. You still have to work out beforehand the minimum allowed altitude for the target then enter that value into the “horizon” field on the planning tool and it will work out the time the target reaches that altitude and set it as the end time for the target in the sequence. If that target is the only target in your sequence then reaching the end time will end the sequence: parking the scope is one of the end of sequence options you can select. You could also define a second target in the sequence, with a start time about the end time of the first target and when the first target finishes (i.e. reaches roof level), SGP will slew over to the second target and begin imaging that. Clear, dark skies are rare and precious, you must use every minute!
cheers
John