Pavol A. Dubovsky replied to the topic 'ekos for spectroscopy' in the forum. 2 years ago

Thank you Jasem. This is what I'm currently doing. But this procedure requires the presence of the user at the computer for at least 10 minutes always when moving to next target. For me better option would be to lose some observing time of the spectrograph when it waits for the user to start the guiding manualy. This manual operation last 1 minute maximum. And I can go away to observe visually.
But OK I see EKOS wants to do everything automatically and there is no way how to stop it. Right? Or put some script in the sequence?

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Pavol A. Dubovsky replied to the topic 'ekos for spectroscopy' in the forum. 2 years ago

The FOV is ~ 7 arc min. However astrometry.net is able to solve such small field if enough stars can be detected. Normally 30 seconds exposure is needed. I made some effort to make it work. But the problem with mechanical torsions and slit shift still remains. So I decided to look for semi-automated solution. With PHD2 alone there is an option to switch off the autostar selection. Even in EKOS you can unselect autostar on guiding panel. But when sequence works it seems the EKOS force the guider to select the guiding star automatically.

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Pavol A. Dubovsky replied to the topic 'ekos for spectroscopy' in the forum. 2 years ago

HI Hy,
Your approach was my initial idea. Let clarify why it doesn't work.
1st - Actually for plate solving I use third camera installed on finderscope. Mainly because the FOV. The plate solution is quick and always successful on finder. But the finder and the main telescope are not exactly aligned.
2nd - I tried to use guiding camera on the main telescope for plate solving. Unfortunately the FOV is too small. The process fails often.
3rd - for mechanical reasons put the slit exactly in the center of the image is not an easy task. Moreover it moves slightly, few pixels, as the telescope is pointing at different parts of the sky.

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Pavol A. Dubovsky created a new topic ' ekos for spectroscopy' in the forum. 2 years ago

Hi friends,
I'm setting up Ekos for work with LISA spectrograph. There are 2 cameras on it. One for guiding one for collect spectra. I have created sequences which include all necessary jobs. Move to the target, plate solving, correction, calibration frames with neon lamp (using simple python script), images of standard star, target star, move to the next target and so on. The problem is with guiding. Both internal guider and PHD2 are not able to automatically move the target star to the slit position. OK, I can do this one step manually. But I have to watch carefully the job progress to be ready when guiding starts. Because EKOS don't wait. It starts guiding on automatically selected star and the spectra capturing starts immediately or with defined delay. Of course the automatically selected star is not always the target star and it is never in the slit position. Is there any way to prevent EKOS to start the guiding process automatically?

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