Non Imaging application

[Julian Stuermer]

Dear all,

we currently plan to set up a spectroscopy project here at our observatory.
It will be a fiber-fed spectrograph for exoplanet research (actually the spectrograph is almost finished).

On telescope side I was wondering if ACP could in principle be used for this none imaging application.
Compared to astrophotography the procedure differs drastically in some points:
The guiding and aquisition camera looks onto a tilted mirror with an hole in it, where the fiber is located.
Therefore the target star will vanish when it hits the fiber. Usually one uses the remaining wings around the hole to keep the star well centered on the fiber.
Also regarding calibration images it is necessary to switch on/off some calibration lamps.

My question now is how fexible the ACP software (and the scheduler) is and if such things - at least in principle - could be done with the software.
Of course new guiding /aquisition procedures/scripts have to be written, but we would need to write such procedures by ourselfs anyways.
It would be amazing if the ACP framework could be used and adapted by ourselfs to our needs.

all the best
Julian

[Bob Denny]

Julian --

If any automation system could do it, ACP could. It is really open. The observing logic is all script, and the library of tools for support is usable from many languages, even MATLAB or Excel. I would NOT write in VBScript, it is horrible. For script I would use JScript, the extended JavaScript that comes with Windows. ACP is a native script engine host with support for Microsoft's script debugging. So with Visual Studio you will have a very complete debugging environment. You will have to learn the OS objects like FileSystemObject and the support for Windows objects (which ACP lives in). The principle is like Java beans but cross language.

I would be happy to guide you as best I can, but as you know developing and debugging code by email or telephone is impossible.