Hi All,

Another vote for : "Please do NOT discontinue support for Charon."

I have completely automated Charon for tracking and general plate solving. My own custom observatory control program shells to Charon using a keyboard buffer utility. It then exports the Charons result to file which is interrogated by my application and used for tracking. Its also used as part of an automated asteroid hunting system. The image is also presented in Guide - nice. This setup has been working great for about 2 years.

No other application is available that fits my requirements as well as Charon. Long Live Charon.

Cheers
Peter - MPC:E18

--- In guide-user@yahoogroups.com, "P. Clay Sherrod" <drclay@...> wrote:
>
> Please do NOT discontinue support for Charon.
>
> Dr. Clay
> _____
> Arkansas Sky Observatories
> MPC H45 - Petit Jean Mountain South
> MPC H41 - Petit Jean Mountain
> MPC H43 - Conway West
> http://www.arksky.org/
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bill J Gray" <pluto@...>
> To: <guide-user@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Friday, November 06, 2009 9:50 AM
> Subject: Re: [guide-user] Charon
>
>
> > Hi Chris,
> >
> > "...For some reason Charon believed the sun was up and that the
> > image was taken here (642)."
> >
> > If that's what it says in Charon's settings menu, then that's the MPC
> > code the program will use. Unfortunately, it can't get the MPC code from
> > the FITS header. (Not in any reliable or standard way, that is. I'm sure
> > the MPC code is sometimes stored in FITS headers, but I'd be gobsmacked
> > if any two programs stored them in the same way. Setting it through Charon
> > is more reliable.)
> >
> > I'm pleased to hear from some folks using the program. Although I've
> > done very little except maintenance on it for some years, I was tempted to
> > make a major change when John Greaves pointed out this paper to me:
> >
> > http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2233
> >
> > The program described in the article loads up an image and
> > automatically figures out where that image is in the sky, given
> > a pretty rough estimate of the image scale. I'd considered some
> > similar tricks long ago, but didn't think it would run very
> > quickly. Seems it's actually quite fast, and I can see several
> > ways in which it could be both simplified and sped up. The result
> > would be that Charon could be much more reliable and the need for
> > user control would mostly go away: the program could run in an
> > almost totally automated fashion. But it would be a _big_ project;
> > I doubt I'll do it any time soon!
> >
> > -- Bill
> >
> >
> >
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