Like many others i use the time during the bright moon to image Ha/SII, i would love if SGP had an option to calculate the distance between the target and the moon to easier stay far enough away from the moon to avoid gradients.
I would like to see this in the planning tools, but also something down in the status bar that would give a warning if too cloose to a bright moon.
In the future this could be used to create automatic day to day target plans to maximize good data.
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It’s a good feature idea, though it would need to be implemented differently for automated sessions
something like if the target is closer than _____’ to the moon, stop imaging (or do not image).
it pokes at a larger discussion and probably next level kind of thing for SGP where it chooses targets based on things like seeing conditions, proximity to the moon, etc. instead of the current (and good) sequential time-based one
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There are other products which do this for you. I am very fond of AstroPlanner where I have got a macro which selects against the detailed local horizon which AstroPlanner allows, followed by cut off distance from the Moon in degrees plus cadence plus order of settime etc. In short it gives me a list from a starting imaging time for the day and knowing the approx imaging time for each target it replots the target positions as they rise and set - This is what I call true planning and might be quite a problem for SGPro. Thanks to Ken and the new JSON sequences I have now a progam which has a Master list of targets which is rebuilt by program against the astroplanner list. Run this rebuilt sequence and I don’t think you can a more efficient imaging session. The only problem is as usual the UK weather!!
If any one is interested then would be happy to share.
Of course there’s other products that does this, the question is if they were user friendly and my answer to that question would be no, i want something that can be learned in 5 minutes that can be easily learned by the other users of the 2 remote observatories that i got access too
I actually installed astroplanner a couple years ago and found it very confusing to use, seems like way too many features added making it hard to learn.