New [ and free! ] software to help taking flats alongside SGP Pro

General
21

Yeah. I realised that was a stupid suggestion about 2 mins after posting but by then i was offline so didn’t correct my post.

22

Thanks for this. I’m going to use it myself.

23

Thank you:rofl:

24

OK, here’s what i ended up with:

Dim Telescope
set Telescope = CreateObject("AstroPhysicsV2.Telescope")
Telescope.Connected = True
Telescope.UnPark
Telescope.Tracking = False
Telescope.SlewToAltAz 101.3, 2.5
Telescope.Connected = False

this points the telescope to the observatory wall on the east side, which is where my flat panel is. the alt/az was determined somewhat empirically (the walls are not aligned with the compass directions, but close)

i havent yet tried running this from SGP but it does the right thing when i double click it in the file explorer.

thanks for the help!

rob

1 Like
25

ok - something to report.

the script works from within SGP in a flats sequence, however, for some reason it seems to have failed on the very first event. the telescope started to slew and then something apparently interrupted it. i canceled the sequence, unchecked the first event, and restarted the sequence. i have to uncheck the first event because i guess on a resume it does not run the script, so i would have been taking pictures of stars.

on the resume, the script again ran (i had it set before every event) and the telescope properly slewed.

in the past, when using the park command to point the scope at the panel, i knew that SGP would fail to slew to a new target, so i would always put my flats target at the very end of the sequence. i had hoped that by using this script method, that SGP would be able to continue on to another target after the flats. however, since the telescope is not tracking, SGP is unable to slew after finishing the flats. however, a post-event script which starts tracking again does allow SGP to proceed. in this way i should be able to automate flats with different rotator angles by interspersing flat targets between actual targets.

on the 2nd resume again the script was not run even though i had reshuffled the targets. i guess i might have to put in a dummy event to make sure the script always runs on my real flats events.

one problem is that SGP attempts to start the guider before running the flats, and then apparently keeps trying to guide while the flats are being taken. for some reason this caused a timeout on the guide camera (using API guider as the camera is SBIG with 2 chips behind one USB.)

i can upload the log later for @ken or @jared to look at.

rob

26

@jared @ken, ok here is my logfile from last night, maybe it says something about why the pre-event script did not run sometimes:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1U4tWCDKcG1qI6YHmf5jH63iXrqFQmW-K

thanks, rob

27

Hi Rob

Don’t know if this will help but do you need a pause in three vbs script after the slew to give the mount time to get to the right place?

Something like ‘Wscript.Sleep(30000)’ for a 30 sec delay?

Steve

28

not sure - on every subsequent invocation of the script, the telescope slewed properly and SGP waited. i think (hope) that the SlewToAltAz command is synchronous.

rob

29

There is no need to add that delay. The script should not advance to the next line until the slew to the Alt,Az is completed. I thought that was the case years ago, but I added some logging with timestamps that proved it.