[ Prev | Next ]

Continuous Improvement

• Modify AstroMain to raise a Telescope Alert when Slew Monitor is forced to abort a slew.   There have been two recent cases where Telescope Slewing Flag hasn't changed back to False (0) after making a physical slew, and the Slew Monitor times out after 4 minutes and the slew is aborted.  When this happens a red telescope alert should be raised and reported.  A green alert should be issued after the Abort Slew has been issued and telescope is tracking again.  Implemented in AstroMain 3.77.3.
  Done 2025-09-10 (AstroMain 3.77.13)
   
• Modify AstroMain to count and report cases where Slew Monitor is forced to abort a slew.   There have been two recent cases where Telescope Slewing Flag hasn't changed back to False (0) after making a physical slew, and the Slew Monitor times out after 4 minutes and the slew is aborted.  When this happens a counter should be incremented and the final number of such cases reported during the Session's Finishing Stage.  Implemented in AstroMain 3.77.3.
  Done 2025-09-10 (AstroMain 3.77.13)
   
• Modify AstroMain's SlewMonitor to abort a telescope slew that appears to have evidentally finished without waiting for 4 minute timeout.  There have been two recent cases where Telescope Slewing Flag hasn't changed back to False (0) after making a physical slew, and the Slew Monitor times out after 4 minutes and the slew is aborted.  It is proposed to modify AstroMain's SlewMonitor to measure the slew distance in Az/Alt terms and when slew has evententally finished and the scope is at/near target position and a suitable 'settle' time is allowed for, and the Dome Slew has completed or is not applicable, the Monitor should issue a Telescope.Abort without having to wait for 4 minute timeout.  Implemented a preliminary solution in AstroMain 3.77.3 by reducing the timeout period from 4 minutes (240s)  to 2.5 minutes (150s).
  Done 2025-09-10 (AstroMain 3.77.13)
   
• Add a checkbox on AstroMain's (Observatory Mode) Manager Tab to force focusing to be skipped for the current target. In some situations where there is an imperative need to move directly to main frame imaging - for example because of incoming cloud - it would be useful to have a button that could be used to skip Target focusing if it is known that scope is already well focused.  The flag should be automatically reset for the next target.
  Done 2025-09-10 (AstroMain 3.77.13)
   
• Modify AstroMain (VMA Mode) to make it better at measuring magnitude of faint sources.  AstroMain (VMA Mode) has difficulty extracting the magnitude of variables when they are in faint part of their period or range.  CY Lyr is typical in this regard.  It is proposed that after Plate Solving (that typically uses Detection Threshold) 15.0), the Detection Threshold is changed to 2.0 and the Inventory is then reshown.   This will allow fainter star objects to be detected during VMA Star Mag Extraction.  Implemention attempted in AstroMain 3.77.13.Although Detection Threshold was changed to 2.0 following the image linking operation using RedoInventory(2.0), but the the invArrays weren't updated as a consequence and therefore it didn't actually provide any improvement in the ability to measure faint stars.  This was finally noticed and fixed in AstroMain 3.77.16.
  Implemented 2025-09-14 (AstroMain 3.77.16)  
   
• Add a button / routine to AstroMain (Analysis Mode) to auto-align and stack images of a moving comet or asteroid. Comet/Asteroid images are currently captured with PHD2's 'Lock Shift' set at the comet's rate of motion force, that keeps the comet more-or-less in the centre of a set of images.  However this can be thrown off by tracking or other  guiding issues. Typically it necessary to manually select the centrod of the comet in each image, and use CCDSoft's Align Centroids to fix the comet at a specific x/y location based on the position of the centroid in the first image. If the comet is very faint and it is possible to see or reliably select a centroid the only way of getting a final image is to stack frames assuming that the Lock Shift method has worked.  It would be useful to develop a routine that would shift each image frame based on forecast position of comet in each image.  THe routine was copy each image in turn to the 'aligned' folder, plate solve it, , set TheSky6 to time of image,  fetch the forecast Ra/Dec of the comet from TheSky6, convert RADec coordinates to XY coordinates, and for images other than the first image, shift the image so that forecast position of comet will be at the forecast X/Y position of comet in first frame.   Even if actual position of comet differes slightly from the forecast position of the comet, the difference will be constant over the time series.  Implementation made in AstroMain 3.77.16 using new Align method and new routine 'AlignFramesOnTarget()'  This works (provided images link ok) but runs quite slowly due to the time to perform image linking on each frame.  The routine handles fractional shifting using the algorithum on pag 325 of "The Handbook of Astronomical Image Processing" by Richard Berry & James Burnell.  It migtt be feasible up the process by just image linking on the first (Reference) frame, to pick up the WCS, Camera Angle and Image Scale, and find the 8- 10 brightest stars, and then compute a  the shift in Matched Brightest Stars and the shift due to Non-Sidereal Target Movement  in order to get the overall shiftX & shiftY for each.
  Done (AstroMain 3.77.16)  
   
• Modify/Extend AstroMain Analysis to perfom Full Frame Photometry and auto extract magnitude of target object.  After plate solving the details of the top 10 star objects (object no. Ra, Dec, Magnitude)  should be lifted from the FITS Header and used to get to extract the Raw Mag of each of these stars to develop a best MagAdj value, and then used to calculate a calibrated magnitude of target object. The measurement should be reported and saved a measurement result in the AstroStarMag database.  A similar method was actually employed during a subsequent improvement to estimate the Limiting Magnitude of the current Image.
  To do (AstroMain 3.77.13+)  

[ Prev | Next ]

Back to Top Issue,  Back to Top