Hi,
So I encountered some issues with AutoFlats last night/this morning. I'm posting this here in case other potential ACP newbies run into this too.

1) Running a multi image plan with dawn flats coughed up an error during plan compilation, it said the defaultflat.txt was missing. But it and defaultdawnflat.txt were certainly in my
C:\Data\ACP Astronomy\Plans
folder, (I have My Documents mapped to C:\Data, could that be the problem?).
I copied the defaultdawnflat.txt file to the
C:\Program Files\ACP Obs Control\WebDocs\plans\ebenson
folder and it ran the plan again, this time it worked, why is that? The help docs specify it should be "in your default plans folder (typically My Documents\ACP Astronomy\Plans)." Is this just a case of the help file being out of date?


2) AutoflatPlanGen was throwing an error (this occurred while I was trying to solve issue #1 above). The error string from the MsgBox is the following:

---------------------------
Filter O3,Blue,Green,Red is not configured in AutoFlatConfig. Cannot continue.
You must edit AutoFlatConfig.txt and set up your filters. See ACP Help, Automatic Sky Flats.
---------------------------

But I think this error is bogus because my AutoFlatConfig is configured exactly as per the help file (I followed the steps verbatim), here it is minus all the commented lines:

TargetBackgroundADU 30000 ; Target flatfield mean in ADU
TargetADUTolerance 10000 ; Tolerance on the above
MinExposure 1 ; Exposure interval range
MaxExposure 20
IRAF_FITS False ; True for IRAF compatible IMAGETYP
FolderName AutoFlat ; Images sub-folder AutoFlat root
TwilightSunLo -9 ; Low elevation of Sun for flats (morning)
TwilightSunHi +2 ; Hi elevation of Sun for flats (evening)
ADUAcceleration_AM 0.95 ; Factors to improve exposure scaling ADUAcceleration_PM 1.05
Filter O3
Filter Ha
Filter I
Filter R
Filter Red
Filter V
Filter Green
Filter B
Filter Blue
Filter Lum

The file I choose to process was
C:\Program Files\ACP Obs Control\WebDocs\plans\ebenson\last-plan-from-web.txt
and the contents are:

#startsetnum 1 ; Persistent set numbering added by ACP
#completionstate 0,1,0,0,0 ; Plan completion status added by ACP
;
; Single target color series plan by Eric Benson, created Wed, 5 Jan 2011 15:59:55 UTC
;
#afinterval 60
#dither
#posang 180
#count 9,5,5,5
#interval 600,200,200,200
#binning 1,2,2,2
#filter O3,Blue,Green,Red
PK244+12.1 8.671111111111111 -20.889444444444443
#dawnflats
#shutdown

I chose C:\Data\ACP Astronomy\Plans\defaultflat.txt (and on a second try C:\Data\ACP Astronomy\Plans\defaultdawnflat.txt) as destination output, they didn't exist at the time.
Is there something about using a plan file in the program Files folder tree that is against the rules? (I'm only running WinXP)
Eventually I got around the problem with Notepad and examples in the help file and made this file:
10, O3, 1, 180
10, Blue, 2, 180
10, Green, 2, 180
10, Red, 2, 180

I'll save my last issue for another post since it is only somewhat related.

EB