[guide-user] Re: Scope control

Greg Roberts Jan 21, 2000

Morning Bill,

Thanks for your last communication re when next version of GUIDE will be
available. I will of course get the upgrade when it comes out.

Now into third month of retirement and sorry to say I dont miss being a
professional astronomer-I seem now to be getting busier and busier doing my
hobbies, of which astronomy and satellite tracking are two of them.

Ive been following the discussion in the Guide-user group re telescope
controls and this has prompted this message.

I am playing around with video satellite tracking. I recently purchased a
low light level (0.05 lux) surveillance CCD video "camera"- actually just
the chip/electronics and no lens, and attached it to my 5 inch f/5 refractor
after machining a suitable adapter. In my miserable city lit skies ( naked
eye limit about mag 4) I could see stars down to about magnitude 9 on the
monitor using the ccd camera. Ive also been able to see satellites cross the
field of view and at a rough estimate reckon I can get down to about
magnitude +8 on a typical 800km high satellite at a reasonable elevation.
Being video the images are viewed in near realtime (Im not sure what the
delay is in the ccd readout but its probably quick enough to ignore) on a
monitor and I can either capture the screen image as a BMP file or as an AVI
file ( the latter are enormous ~90 Mbytes for about 30 sec recording).
Anyway the gist of all this is that I decided to motorize my satellite
tracking altaz mount with stepper moters ( with grateful thanks to Mel
Bartels for the excellant work he has done in making his system available to
anyone) and track satellites from the warmth and safety of being inside the
house.

Now GUIDE comes in. Mels system can use GUIDE but the specific query I have
is:

When I use GUIDE in the satellite tracking mode and when in animation mode
with the centre of the screen locked on the satellite- ie satellite stays in
same position but star fields move by as satellite crosses the sky,will
GUIDE be able to communicate with MEL's SCOPE.EXE and send the current
RA/DEC of the satellite so that my tracking setup will follow the satellite
and keep the satellite reasonably well in the field of view? Reading the
literature I have re Guide and SCOPE this looks possible to me,but not
having tried it yet I would like to have this confirmed or otherwise.

I am also thinking that it should be possible to use the screen captured BMP
image of the satellite/starfield to overlay it on the corresponding GUIDE
star field and do positional work on the satellite-much easier than trying
to remember exactly where one did a position/time visually at the eyepiece
with a stopwatch.(Oh heck-was it this star or was it that one?) Using a
BMP image means I would also need the precise time the image was captured -
anyway all great fun and its challenges such as this that make a hobby so
interesting and rewarding.

Im about halfway through the electronic work of Mels system and still have
to attach the steppers to the telescope-dont see any problems other than
time ( I now wish there were more than 24hours in a day and actually sleep
less now than when I worked as an astronomer so that I can get more done )

Anyway thats enough waffling
Best wishes and keep up the excellant work
Greg
>
> Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 15:38:01 -0500 (EST)
> From: "Bill J. Gray" <pluto@...>
> X-Mailing-List: guide-user@egroups.com
> Subject: [guide-user] Scope xtrol
>
> (3) Hooking up Mel Bartels' motorized scope system to Guide works in an
> entirely different matter. You just use the 'ALTAZ' radio button in the
> Settings... Scope Control dialogue. The reason is that by the time Mel
> and I started discussing getting our software to communicate, Mel
> already had nice software to control his telescope. About all he wanted
> from Guide was to send and receive RA/dec data, so that you could click
> on an object in Guide and have its RA/dec sent to his software (or so
> that his software could send an RA/dec to Guide, and Guide would show a
> chart of that chunk of the sky).
>
> -- Bill