An application wrote by me, for me. Never thought I would actually write a program that's actually useful in real life, otherwise I would have paid more attention during those uni days.
This was written to automate the mount drift and camera exposure required to do a 'CCD drift polar alignment', a modern adaptation of polar alignment with photographic plate. A good explaination of the priciple behind it can be found here and here.
There are many polar alignment softwares out there such as PoleAlignMax(free but note J2000 issue), EQAlign(free), PEMPro and WCS, but out of all, I feel most comfortable using the CCD drift method. It's probably because the alignment result and procedure is quite 'visual' to comprehend and straight forward to execute, Ol' Skool. The downside is that you had to manually set the tracking rate and hold the East or West slew button down for the duration of the drift, that's where my little app comes in.
Initially, I wrote the the whole drift and exposure procedure in VBscript. It didn't take long to realize that the 'sleep' call I was using as the timer was not accurate and hogging a lot of resources. Converting it to VB forms did make it much more efficient to operate and also looks prettier.
On the right is the little helper window showing me which way to make the correction on the mount after looking at the star trails. It is customised to match the orientation of my CCD camera ie. up and down is the Right Ascension (RA) axis.
At the moment the application directly interfaces to EQMOD and Maxim DL. If the demand is out there I may convert it to use more open ASCOM interfaces and make it available to the public domain.
See below for my drift example.
See below for my drift example.
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| 10Minute drift before correction |
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| After correction |
Very nice. Wished I had something like this back when I did it manually in the earlier part of 2000 - 2005. Wrote an article on it and was published in AstrophotoInsight magazine in 2005.
ReplyDeleteRobert V.
Looks good to me, is there any possibility to test it? that would be nice. thanx mate.
ReplyDeleteHi Dave,
ReplyDeleteAre you planning to reelase this to the public ? The only reason that there has been no demand for this is that DARV method doesn't come up in polar align searches ( which I think is not a good thing ) and consequently your little gem gets even less exposure.
I am going to mention your website and DARV in astronomyshed forums to see if it will help generate some interest. It would be useful if you could make it available to download on some form of public use license.
Great little tool. Well done.
Thanks
Nalin.