Hi Bob,

you can use cygwin. It's working fine with it. Besides why sticking to an old fashioned os which keeps your from evolving and using up to date software? Linux/Mac system are much more userfriendly that msoft stuff for over 10 years, now. And there are more software solutions for each problem than anyone can use at the same time. Guide's working much better and you have a realtime system which gives your telescope more accuracy in pointing to objects.

My home town  observatory will have its 20th birthday this november and we were using motion drivers which were brought up in the seventies. They were outdated already when they were fitted at the mount due to not having engeneers at hand who would get us better hardware and the written telescope control was set up under Dos because the available programmer didn't know any better. Over the past ten years we had major changes in our management so everything was left as it is. That let us to a point where we ran out of old computers and had trouble running the software with any kind of Windows due to cancelt Dos support. This spring we encountered new problems with inaccurate pointing of the telescope.
The investigation we started got finally results. We found that due to the non-realtime system of msoft's windows the software clock differs a lot during an observation night so much that every pointing has a bias between 4 to 7 arcmin. If you think that's not much, compare it with our field of view of 15 arcmin.
We have a 600mm in diameter Cassegrain running with 7460mm focal length. Our theoretical resolution ist 1.2 arcseconds limited by seeing. For this telescope the inaccuracy of Windows is a problem.
We ran on the same Thinpad R51 laptop in the same dosbox the same Dos code of the telescope software. Under linux every pointing attempt was successful with mispointing below an arcsec, measure with splitting double stars. Unter Windows most mispointing happend to be at 6 to 7 arcmin, and re-positioning didn't help.
So that we used the same dosbox and the same telescope software code ensures that the misstakes don't lie there, the only thing we changed was the os and we recorded the changes of the clock.
The difference in the timing correspond to the offset in the pointing. We calculated it manually with the algorithm which is used in the telescope software.

We although made sure not making any other fundamental mistakes which could have biased the investigation. The facts remained.

For now we have a solution running the telescope control with a dosbox under linux until the new drive is ready. Using new, state of the art hardware including mems, actual i/o-interfaced based on ethernet an realtime operating system make our good old cassegrain ready for the next 20 years keeping in mind to continualy updating to better hard- and software for not doing the same mistakes again. The best of all is, that upgrading to more actual hard- and software and maintaining it in future costs us not even 5% of what was spent in the beginning. Till now we just spent 130€ for the hardware and the software will be written for free.
And if the worst comes to the worst... we still can operate the telescope with the old stuff which take out any risks.

Updating doesn't mean that you have to disable the telescope for some time. Upgrades are made in parallel mode which includes an everworking backup.

Christian

--
"A little learning never caused anyone's head to explode!"


"Ein wenig Lernen hat noch niemandens Kopf zum Explodieren gebracht!"

>________________________________
> Von: "robertjmodic@..." <robertjmodic@...>
>An: guide-user@yahoogroups.com
>Gesendet: 0:33 Freitag, 22.Juni 2012
>Betreff: [guide-user] Re: Astrometry.net
>
>
> 
>
>
>Christian,
>
>I'd try the command line version except that there doesn't appear to be a Windows version of the software.
>
>Bob
>
>--- In guide-user@yahoogroups.com, Christian Ambros <ambrosc@...> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Bob,
>>
>> the guys at astrometry recommend using the command line version due to unstable servers at the moment.
>>
>> The last time I gave the online version a try was four years ago and it was to slow for meaningfull use. So I switch to command line. As I had to start over with astrometry.net this year due to my Ph.D, I got some updates.
>>
>> Fts? Is it meant to be some kind of fits format? Try using correct fits format, png oder jpg because every other format will be tried to convert into png.
>>
>> If you need any help with setting up astronmetry.net command line email me.
>>
>>  
>> Christian
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