Questions regarding ACP Capabilities for potential new customer

[Gregory Nelson]

I have a new observatory with a roll off roof in Gold Canyon, AZ. Dave Miller helped me with system design install of a Planewave CDK 20 and Diffraction Limited AC4040 camera on a Paramount MEII. I have a planewave rotator to install on the telescope when I get a part to adapt the camera. The system also has an AOX. This is all installed on a lift built by Piertech who also built the Roll off roof and controller. I have SkyAlert from Jim Collins on the way as well. I also have an automated power switch. I am sure that all this equipment is compatible with ACP.

I would like to move to a system like ACP and love the planning features and automatic operation it offers. I am a long time user of SGP with my portable telescopes and learned to love the ability to go to bed and allow the system to control movement to targets while I sleep. Now that I have an observatory and more complex equipment, I am looking for the same thing. I wanted to get all my equipment shaken out before downloading the 60 day trial copy, so I have not tried ACP yet but have watched the videos.

Long introduction to ask a few questions.

1) I want to add a second telescope and camera to the system for dual imaging. The camera is a Color camera with no filter wheel, and a focuser. Can ACP readily handle simultaneous acquisition and focus control of two camera and two focusers? Is this through Maxim software or can other package be used?

2) I have been allowing Maxim to close down my observatory that works well most nights. However, last week I awoke in the AM to find the Roll Off roof open. Good news is that the Piertech roof controller has a proximity switch to detect the telescope in park position, which worked to prevent a roof crash. Bad news is that the reason the mount did not park is that the SkyX crashed on the control computer. This generates the question, how does ACP detect program hangs and crashes, power failures, etc and restart the system to assure control, particularly to stow the system? Maxim DL can also hang and occasionally needs to be power cycled. Does ACP have alerting and/or can it run recovery routines? Since I have a ROR and lift, I do need a working control computer system and power to make the telescope safe.

3) AOX guiding. I have finally gotten the AOX guiding to work with dithering for my system. Some of the recent Maxim revisions have had my input and testing to get the AOX system working with their new AC4040 CMOS camera and Starchaser guider. Some nights, I can get 4-5 hours of continuous AO guiding. Other nights, the “bump” system loses the guide star and as you know Maxim’s built in logic doesn’t recover the star. Does ACP handle these situations so a guide star can be reacquired. As an operator, I simply do a locate and then start AO tracking and guiding is restored. Unfortunately Maxim doesn’t do this simple reset.

Thanks for any insight you can give me.

Greg

[Bob Denny]

Hello Greg --

Thanks for the excellent introduction. You're definitely going for the gold with your setup. It should be fine with ACP Expert. The only consideration is managing the lift/roof combination for safe automated opening and closing (as you note in your questions). It can be done..... with care.

1) I want to add a second telescope and camera to the system for dual imaging. The camera is a Color camera with no filter wheel, and a focuser. Can ACP readily handle simultaneous acquisition and focus control of two camera and two focusers? Is this through Maxim software or can other package be used?

Unfortunately not. One at a time. It is easy to switch configurations, only a couple of minutes, and the web UI dynamically adapts. However with the Scheduler you will have requests for one or the other imaging systtem and with OAG and rotating you will not be able to mix the two. I can tell you how to switch request databases, and that would take maybe another couple of minutes, so that you keep your queue separated for each imaging system. Someone else can comment, but my observation is that your problems multiply when running piggyback on a single mount.

2) [...] Does ACP have alerting and/or can it run recovery routines? Since I have a ROR and lift, I do need a working control computer system and power to make the telescope safe.

ACP does not "detect crashes". It does carefully detect errors coming from devices... for example if your mount fails in a way that generates a run-time error from TheSky, ACP will detect this and stop your run in its tracks, leaving the error message from TheSky in the run log. ACP does not have "software victory over hardware" capabilities, and it does not try to detect and recover from program crashes or device hard failures. Again if the device returns an error then it will see that. log it, and stop. It's up to you to solve the hardware problem or crash. I refer you to this note Why is it that ACP gets "stuck" sometimes? Can't you do something? for more philosophical info.

With that said, the upcoming release of ACP will have tight/native integration with the Lunatico Good Night System, a watchdog service that can alert you quickly to a crash or freeze which causes the heartbeat messages from being sent. Also there are many people here who run for months, even years, without crashes and lockups. The #1 evil beast is USB.

Does ACP handle [guide star loss mid-exposure] so a guide star can be reacquired?

No, but if, at the end of an exposure that's part of a repeat series, ACP detects that the guider unexpectedly stopped, it will restart the guider before the next exposure.

Feel free to ask more questions, or call during business hours AZ Standard Time (UTC - 7) +1 480 396 9700. We're in Mesa.

[Gregory Nelson]

Bob, thanks for the reply. I know that Diffraction Limited's Maestro software can manage simultaneous acquisition with one instance serving as the master. Is it possible for ACP to control the Maestro master and then let it natively control the slaved instance running acquisition on the second telescope. I was really looking for simultaneous acquisition so that a color camera/refractor can capture the color data while the higher resolution camera/planewave system gathers Lum and/or narrowband data. Higher productivity on dark sky nights is the goal.

--Greg

[Bob Denny]

Is it possible for ACP to control the Maestro master and then let it natively control the slaved instance running acquisition on the second telescope.

I don't know, and I am sorry for that. I understand what you want and it makes sense. However, I am close to releasing an update to ACP and I am not in a position to look at adding such a major feature. I'm sorry. Perhaps you can find other software that can manage two imaging systems on one mount.