File name setting for side of meridian

I’ve just got SGP and thinking of switching from CCDAP and MaxIm. One thing I had in my file names were which side of the meridian the subexposures were taken on. When I would have my whole nights subs I could calibrate with flats from the East side then know which ones were taken on the West side so I could calibrate with new flats with the camera rotated 180. I didn’t see any variable that indicated that in the key. Would it be much trouble to include a variable for this?

Best Regards, Dan

Interesting idea. I’m assuming that you are also rotating the camera
180deg after the meridian flip?

Yes sir. The usual night is to take a set of flats for the East side of the meridian before I start imaging, and I’ll calibrate those images (usually as they come in) then after the flip and camera rotation, I let all the West side subs come in and finish up the night. Then at the end of the session I take another set of flats to match the post flip camera rotation and calibrate all the West side subs. It was easy to keep track of which subs had been calibrated or not by just looking at the file name which had a W or E in it. :slight_smile:
Dan

The FITs header has the angle in it for both the flats and the lights. I’m not sure what you’re using to process, and I’ve never actually tried this, but I wonder if the PixInsight automatic calibration module would pickup on the angle of your lights and flats and process accordingly (and automatically)?

Thanks,
Jared

as far as i can tell from reading the source, the only attributes of a flat are the filter and binning… so i don’t think PI’s BPP can figure out the rotation angle from the FITS header.

Yeah, I know that MaxIm can’t tell the difference between position angles of different flats… That’s why I calibrate all my East side images first, then delete the flats and shoot new ones for the 180* camera rotation after the session is done. It would just be handy to see the E or W in the file name rather than look at the FITS header of each image to know who is who… In CCDAP it’s one of the file name variables you can choose… Makes it much easier to know which images need which flat to use.

Probably why MaxIm can’t distinguish between them either…

I’ll add the camera angle to the list of tokens which should solve this (and be what you actually care about vs pier side)

Thanks,
Jared

Thank you Jared! Mucho appreciated! :slight_smile: