View Single Post
  #2  
Old 29-01-2008, 05:52 PM
sheeny's Avatar
sheeny (Al)
Spam Hunter

sheeny is offline
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Oberon NSW
Posts: 14,438
G'Day Roger,

I don't know of any ready made algorithms that would do what you want, but my approach would be to do something like this:
1. export a list of targets for the night;
2. group them by RA hour or half hour;
3. starting at the western most RA group, sort them by dec - ascending;
4. for the next RA group, sort them by dec - decending;
5. alternate ascending and descending sorting with each RA group.

The width of the RA group (1 hour or 1/2 hour, etc) depends on how many objects you have in each group. As 1 hour of RA equals 15°, if you start with 1 hour groups and find you have more than about 10 objects in the group then you'll be doing more slewing in RA than dec, so use a smaller RA group. At 1/2 hour RA group width, you can have about 20 objects in the group before the cumulative RA movements are more than the dec movements.

Al.
Reply With Quote