Questeions about ACP functionality

[Roy Salisbury]

I'm re-evaluation my options for automated imaging at my observatory (ACP, CCDCommander, CCDAP, ect) and was wondering if you might be able to answer some of these questions about ACP.

1. Is there a way to have ACP cancel taking light images at dawn so flats can be taken properly (or even cancel dusk flats at astronomical twilight)? I underestimated my imaging session this last weekend and ACP was still happily "trying" to take images at 6am with the sun already up. So my flats were skipped. Note: I have only been using the web interface for setting up plans, so perhaps the standalone planner has this option that I am not aware of.

2. I really like the System Status display. It’s something that I started messing with as a remote display for my web site awhile back, but the ACP one has given me other ideas. Is it possible to somehow interface with the necessary ACP object from "outside" the normal ASP pages so I could get that information? I would probably need to write a web service that my web site could then communicate with as a proxy to ACP. I’m sure I could get the necessary information from MaxIm's objects, but might let ACP do the heavy lifting. I'm only looking at the "System Status" info. Basically I want to be able to show on my website what activity is going on at the observatory. Heck, even a "read only" version of the system status that could be linked to from an IFrame would be good.

3. G2V star selection and calculation. I'm pretty sure this one is not there, but I'll bring it up for a future enhancement. Would be nice if at the beginning of a session the system could select a G2V star, calculate the necessary RGB values and either store them in the log (for later use in stacking) or even possibly shorten/extend the exposure times based on the values.

4. Is the weather server object documented somewhere? I could have just overlooked it. I have my own full weather station setup at the observatory and would like to write a COM object that interfaces with my web service.

5. This is sort of related to #2. Any chance that you may be working on a version of ACP that exposes ACP via SOAP? If not, do you think it’s possible for a 3rd party (such as myself) to do it using the ACP COM objects, or are they too tied to a web (ASP) model.

I have some other questions, but I'll keep searching other posts to see if they have been asked already.

Regards,
Roy (www.hualapaivalleyobservatory.org)