Quote:
Originally Posted by Mighty_oz
Also Ernie how long does this routine usually take you?
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About 45 minutes to an hour for the set up and polar alignment tweaking part. Another 45 minutes to an hour for the long mapping run. If that seems long, sorry, I'm being brutally honest here. And that long mapping run is worth it to have the center of every object fall dead center on your CCD (or within only a handful of arc seconds thereof). A real time saver later. And ProTrack! What a wonderful feature that is! The smile ProTrack puts on my face is priceless. But it needs that long calibration run with all those mapped points to work so beautifully. Because of this set up overhead, when I set up, I like to stay on station for at least three nights. One of the reasons it takes me so long is that my camera is slow and TSX does one thing at a time. It does not overlap slewing with downloads and plate solves. It would be really good if more people than just me would request SB to enhance the automated calibration run process to have more overlap. After all, the program is multithreaded and could do the image acquisition in one thread, overlap the download with the following slew, and fire off a separate thread for each plate solve. If they did this, calibration runs would go much quicker. No big deal for those of us who keep our mounts in observatories, but the MX is a portable mount and so MX owners would be expected to be going through this routine painfully often. Making it faster is in their best interest...
By the way, you can and should bin the maximum amount during automated calibration runs and it will NOT hurt your calibration. I bin 4x4 and set my exposure between 10 and 15 seconds. That speeds things up and doesn't hurt anything.