Bruce,
Absolutely I will let you know. I got this
working a few years back on the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope on
Mt Graham with great success and its been mostly painless. its a
little bit cumbersome getting setup each night, but its really perfect
for scientific telescopes. There are a few things I routinely get asked
for. I should probably make feature requests from these, but i'd have
to have time to follow up and possibly submit some software, and i do
not have that time. maybe in the fall I can officially submit these:
1.
a way to move a guide star around on the chip with ease. Sometimes
there's dirt or something on the chip, near the star, or the star is
just too close to the edge, and on a 4k x 4k chip it takes too long to
use the virtual paddle... our older software just let you shift-click
on a new spot on the frame and the software moved the star there. I
submitted a change a while back for this with a shift-click combination
in PHD2 but it wasn't accepted. There was a suggestion that I make it a
menu option, which was a much cleaner idea. I've just never had a
chance to get back to it and I think the feature request was closed.
2.
slit guiding. We have a few spectrographs. The Vatican telescope
spectrograph uses PHD2 and they have found a combination of settings
that sort of makes it work, but its not perfect. I think there was a
guy in Russia a while back working on a real slit guiding algorithm and
it looked like he really knew what he was doing. I tried to contact him
at one point but did not hear back.
3.
non sidereal guiding. this is a big project. The asteroid folks claim
that some telescopes have guiding software that looks at the position of
stars as they drift through the field, uses ra and dec rates to predict
where they should be in each frame, and correct on that predicted
position vs the observed position. They want that functionality on the
90" bok telescope, which will soon be PHD2. Thats not an easy task..
but it is a common request and the asteroid work is really popular on a
lot of our scopes... so I'll likely make a project of it, eventually.
take care
CJ