Feature request: several park options

Would love to be able to park my Losmandy G11 / Gemini II to Zenith, Home, and CWD.
Zenith is very useful for taking flats with a (manual) flat illuminator.
Thanks!
Rodolphe

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Zenith we can add, home and CWD probably not. ASCOM exposes a single park position. So we can calculate zenith, slew there, then disable tracking. But we cannot know the difference between “Home” and “CWD” as those are driver specific locations and SGP can only call a single “Park” command for those special mount specific positions.

Thanks,
Jared

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Hi Jared

Thanks for your feedback.

I understand the reasoning.

Zenith as an option would indeed be a great addition. Maybe more complicated : offer the possibility to park at zenith just before taking flats and resume tracking (slewing and centering) at the next light in the sequence… That
would be my nirvana :blush:!

Anaway I enjoy the software as it is currently!

Keep up with the great work.

Thanks

Rodolphe

KR

Rodolphe.

Could a script be used to slew to the position used to collect flat data?
Something like this, run before the flat target:

set scope = CreateObject(“ASCOM.Celestron.Telescope”)
scope.Connected = true
scope.Tracking = false
scope.SlewAltaz 180, 90

and afterwards:

set scope = CreateObject(“ASCOM.Celestron.Telescope”)
scope.Connected = true
scope.Tracking = true

You would need to set the scope ID to the one for the ASCOM driver for your mount of course.

Ha ha ! That sounds a great idea​:ok_hand::blush:

Will give it a shot at the next imaging opportunity, this week hopefully.

Do I need a specific instruction to slew/center back to the target (in case I want to follow with a light instruction).

Thanks a lot for the suggestion.

Rodolphe.

I would expect that the next target will slew back to its coordinates as part of the target start process.

A couple of things:
Alt Az slews are specified only to be done when tracking is off and Ra Dec slews when tracking is on, so the tracking commands are neccessary.
The exact AltAz slew command is

scope.SlewToAltAz [azimuth], [altitude]

with azimuth and atitude in degrees. That slew command should wait for the slew to finish.

It should be possible to test in daylight with dummy targets and acquisitions. Far better than struggling in the cold and dark.

Hi

I tried a few things yesterday around parking the G11.

But I ran into an issue: the parking function doesn’t seem to work in SGP.

Reproduction steps:

  • Slew anywhere

  • Save the position as the new parking position in SGP

  • Slew somewhere else

  • Park the scope with the SGP button

→ the scope doesn’t move at all.

I checked the parking advanced features in the Gemini.net ascom driver and confirmed that it allows external software to set parking positions.

Issue seems either in the ascom driver or in sgp.

Has anybody reported it previously?

Thanks.

Nine](http://www.9folders.com/)