Galactic Coordinates requested

[Ignacio Cisneros]

Galactic coordinates. All the preliminary research for my scientific work has been accomplished in galactic coordinates. ACP does not have an option for galactic coordinates input. what are he chances that this feature can be implemented?

[Bob Denny]

Ignacio, since ACP, all of its forms, its Plan language, the Scheduler forms, the Scheduler database, and telescopes all work in equatorial coordinates, perhaps you can make that translation for your special needs. The algorithms are well known. I hope you understand.

[Ignacio Cisneros]

Ignacio, since ACP, all of its forms, its Plan language, the Scheduler forms, the Scheduler database, and telescopes all work in equatorial coordinates, perhaps you can make that translation for your special needs. The algorithms are well known. I hope you understand.

No, Bob, I do not understand. RA Dec is a loosie format. They works well with a wall clock and a ledger.( pre galactic, 19th century tools. ) It is a loosie format because the orientation of HII regions to the galactic plane varies along the RA. The Magnetic field of the galaxy is relative to the galaxy not to the sidereal equator. Galactic latitude is an immediate distance determination proxy, Declination is relative to the celestial equator. Further, My memory of galactic anatomy is indexed to Galactic coordinates. It is the galaxy that you me and everybody else is studying. This is why why my entire file system is in galactic coordinates. Galactic Long and lat preserve the information of of galactic context. Allowing one orientation for up/down and left/right in any image for all image to be the same; orientation relative to a common galactic context is practical for comparing and classify morphologies of extended objects;

Mine is not a special need. The lack of galactic coordinates in ACP is a specific deficiency relative to other professional applications.

ESO SIMBAD, ESO Aladin and Vezier as well as NASA SkyView and ADS, all accept Galactic coordinates and J2000, and ecliptic coordinates. These are my standard sources, and the standard sources for astronomical research, pretty much, everywhere!

Ignacio.

[Bob Denny]

Ignacio -- Until your request, in 14 years no one has asked me for Galactic or Ecliptic coordinates for the data acquisition system. I understand that your catalogs and other processes use other coordinate systems. Perhaps you will find another data acquisition system that better meets your needs. I am sorry that ACP won't do that.

[Ignacio Cisneros]

I can see that we are both working to move astronomy forward. I insist; All other pertinent astronomical information systems accept Glat GLong why not ACP?, and I am happy to collaborate.; and I have to work with what I have. I still see contemporary pear reviewed papers published in Ra Dec, its a silly tradition / convention. As I say: it was not until I transitioned to galactic coordinates that many connections in galactic morphology began to emerge. One can not grasp the galaxy in RA Dec, Our limited minds need a consistent frame of reference which preserves orientation. transitioning is takes us from earthly frame of reference to cosmic frame of reference, it is more than symbolic. it is an evolution of intelligence. I can only point out the the deficiency and hope that things evolve at their own rate.

I am much more concerned with establishing an efficient and rithmic work flow. My experiment calls for great many repeated observations and I have a great many targets that have already emerged from preliminary survey crawling. The sky observation and recovery phase is only commencing. That I can count on ACP is a real blessing, at least in concept. I still can not see clearly how to proceed. At the moment it looks as if it may take months to "plan" the first couple of years of automated sky observations.

As it looks now, I am will have to open each virtual observation, call it up in both SkyView/ Aladin on one hand and Starry Night or the skyx one the other. I have to extract the coordinates and create a ACP plan entry; and then organize the ACP plans in some practical way. I imagined that I was going to "capture the FOV" entry onto ACP planner with a ambiguous future date. FOVI currently do not have a time coordinate. ( also a specific deficiency in both SN and skyX ) this way i could have a virtual sky map of the experiment, as a whole. the ACP plans would be followed by ACP scheduler which would deduce the most efficient dispatch "salesman algorithm" . I do not know how that the specialized observing plas can be prioritized for ACP scheduler, so that ACP scheduler, can prioritize the individual observations.

My observational priorities lie at high galactic latitude. "Galactic near space" or "peri solar parsecs", stuff that is less than 40 parsecs out and which has not yet been identified but which, if populated, will yield the richest crop of M dwarf stars and sub stelar objects with high proper motion. Creating a simple threshold for this criteria is not possible with Ra Dec alone. Those numbers need to be transformed to Glat Glon for that to be used a an index of priority. The higher Glat , the closer it should be, the greater priority it has. On the other hand, I gather that local Alt Az coordinates are already a prioritising datum for Scheduler. but I am not sure. Further, there are already patches of near space that have emerged from multispectral survey analysis. These are places I know of and which will be the first places to catch phenomena. Those have their own priority and probably become the background dispatch pool for the High res scope. the iDK will go through and create the third frame for the comparison blink constructed from DSS1 & 2 data. ( this information I loath to retrofit to Ra Dec. ) that high res scheduled activity, will be interrupted by " detection alarm" from the wide angle repetitive search. ( not yet formalized, Data discrimination pipeline.) Here is where the experiment runs into yet undetermined solutions.

I have no solution yet for automated signal variance detection . Plasma phenomena moves from the dark mode to a glow mode or to discharge mode, unpredictably. Dusty regions of the ISM, deduced to be near, by detecting the high proper motion of faint red stars will be scrutinized. The Wide angle scope is to repeatedly image known hot spots of plasma transients looking for change. Currently manually inspection is done with DSS1 & adn 2 synthetic RGB "plates". With a fresh sequence of images acquired from the sky I have to build Blink Comparison by hand. At this point I have no solution for an automated variation detection. Currently, ( i think ) I would have to intervene in the scheduled high res observing plan to reprioritize for the transient event in progress. if i catch it soon enough, I suspect that i will generate more data than can be process manually by one individual. I might not get to the sky observation for weeks, and this could mean missing it . There is no solid estimate on the duration of the phenomena. ( that datum is a prize of this research ) It would be more effective if a " wide angle , high ress " system could inform the high res scheduler of the location of the variation so that the iDK imaging session would be automatically interrupt and a "alrm procedure be initiated". scheduled.

[Ignacio Cisneros]

did this do through?

[Bob Denny]

Yes, it went though.

[Bob Denny]

Ignacio -- I will put it a different way. I have carefully designed and focused on data acquisition, avoiding the processes of planning (before acquisition) and processing (after acquisition). This has allowed me to focus on the acquisition system needs of a wide range of people, for both astronomical science and for astronomical art. I understand that for your work other coordinate systems are more convenient for planning and for processing. However, the common system used by everyone for acquisition itself is equatorial. I do not think it is silly. If equatorial coordinates are not usable for your needs, then I will have to say that you'll need to find another solution. I have over 100 existing tickets for improvements to ACP and over 50 remaining for scheduler (and a new version of Scheduler with 51 new features, fixes, and changes is in test now). Don't wait for me to add galactic coordinate input to all of my systems.

If you can input equatorial coordinates for your acquisition requests, I am interested in your mission and how ACP Expert's scheduler could be applied. Your acquisition needs appear to be of a similar nature and scale as the AAVSO Photometric All-Sky Survey, which has photometrically calibrated over 80,000,000 stars in 4 bands. They also looked at the planning problem for this and concluded that it was impractical, so they decided to submit everything they wanted to the ACP Scheduler as a test. This included required observations of Landolt star(s) at several air masses for the Hardie Method solution for transformation and extinction. This ran in both the southern and northern hemisphere for several years. It's possible that there is more than one path from need to solution for you, and I will help you where I can and where it makes engineering and business sense for me.

[Ignacio Cisneros]

Its all god:

in terms of other solutions. I am also committed to helping SkyPi get their ACP up and going. thats part of the collaboration there. My observatory is 4 or 5 of miles away. Evelin is already up and going, while Im only now braking ground. thats why we are commencing implementation there at SkyPi. and "what ever works". we have a goal. I'ts not recreational imaging, all thought, we do love what we do.

I am confident that I will find the best implementation for the capabilities that are now "in place" within ACP and its supporting applications. It will be a climb to master the interphases. I have not worked with maxim DL. for instance. having an opportunity to witness some one proficient getting the job don would be a leg up.

I might need to hire a programer to build a supplementary application to do the automated signal variation detection part of the mission. I understand that Tim Puckett is still having to compare Super Novea candidate galaxies by human inspection. That seems 'behind the times'. We have face recognition and OCR and other such amenities. computationally, a simple subtraction of registred frames and a statistical analysis of outlaying blocks of pixels should be enough. . .

I will look into the AAVSO to find out more; see if they have already invented a wheel for me. perhaps some routine can be written to automate Maxim DL, and then communicate with ACP.

In terms of plug in for SN. . I may have misinstalled it? I am new to windows, I have been o a Mac, for ever. but SN certainly does not have a grayed out menu item. present time or future. it must be that i did not accomplish the plug in trasfer correctly from the download window to the SN plug in folder. it was a drag and drop. perhaps it was not unziped?

I look forwards to collaborating.

Ignacio

[Ignacio Cisneros]

a miss installation of the plug in was at fault. a command in windows to download the file from the bulletin board produces file with atachment.php name. i had moved that to SN7Pro plug-in folder. Window actually changes the name, without preserving it zip identity(?) yes, it did. that is what I had transferred to the starry night lug-in folder. This time I retyped the name as it appeared on the bulletin board when I saved the file to local disc. the system recognized it as a zip, not because of the structure of the data but from its extension. Archaic! windows performed the extraction invisibly, with out permission, and a .plug file appeared.

I placed it where I know it should go. but not before spending $90 more on SN pro Plus, thinking that the plus was what was called for, since the instructions on line referenced SN7 pro plus. ugh! simulation curriculum is derelict with support . and they have exacted yet more money from me.

I have menu item now,with ACP . . . on SN7Pro, and SNPro Plus. . .yippy
(. .I wonder what plus means . . )
hurray . . .