Automatic acquisition with Star Analyser & Prism v9

[Olivier Thizy]

Hello,


I have been playing with a Star Analyser last night. I set it up on my C11 (Losmandy Titan mount) with an Atik 460ex CCD camera.

This was the first time I was using Prism v9 with that mount. I decided to use Gemini ASCOM driver (v1.0.18.0 available from http://www.ascom-standards.org/Download ... rivers.htm) as well - a premier for me.

Prism v9 has a very nice feature which allow automatic observation. It is very easy to setup. I started with the bright stars in Cassiopae (in the integrated skymap, just lick on each target and add them on the observing list). I was impressed by the ability to do automatic acquisition in few clics... I recorded my session there:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/shelyak/1 ... /lightbox/

I then took an abstract of BeSS within the area (I just selected the RA within 0h-3h and DEC within 55-55°); another automatic run:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/shelyak/1 ... /lightbox/


Result below... very easy to do, takes a little bit more time to analyse/process...!!!


Cordialement,
Olivier Thizy
Vous ne verrez plus des étoiles comme avant !
http://www.shelyak.com/en/

Automatic observing session...

[Andrew Smith]

Hi Olivier, glad to see you are enjoying the pleasures of automated spectroscopy. I am lucky to have both an observatory and a Paramount ME so all I need to do is open the roof and switch on the power and I can the run the session from the warmth of the house. As part of the The Sky software I can do what you describe all within the one package - not cheap but free with the mount!

In my case I have a LISA and so need to get the star on the slit. The Sky allows you the centre the target by I found it in possible to centre the LISA slit exactly so I wrote a Java Script to take a list of targets slew to them in turn, centre them and then image solve to determine how much to jog the mount to put the star on the slit. It then take the specified number and length of images before moving to the next target. Running Java scripts is again a feature of the package. I use RSpec to show the spectra live as they come in.

I woke the system up last night after its summers rest and so I will be back to searching for faint new Be stars amongst the known B stars. One advantage of this work is you don't need to do much processing to see if the star is in emission and can be done any night the sky is clear which is seldom where I live!

Regards Andrew