Guider Development

The guider needs testing and development. The process is discussed here. The basic discussion of the guiding process is:

Guide star selection
Stage Positioning
Star acquisition
Guiding

Each one of these steps must be tested as there are bugs in all the scripts.

Guide Star Selection

In a scratch directory, try the guidestar script with the dump option. and look at the guidestar1.tmp and guidestar2.tmp files.

Stage Positioning

This is the tough one. This is primarily done by the setstage program. This relies on knowing the stage geometry.

The Guider Test findcenter, is supposed to really find this number (the boresight). This will find the x/y coordinate that the center of the guider is at the center of the CCD; this define is found in rct.h and used in guider.C.

The second part is understanding the nature of the focal plane. The Guider Test allstar, is supposed map out the focal plane by looking at a bunch of stars that are in the focal plane.

Another issue is determing the correct Z distance to position the finder correct Z distance to position

The Guider Test guidedip takes an image at multiple Z distances. Ideally this should be done at different XY locations to see if there is focal plane curvature. The Guider Test blocker takes

Even another issue is to double check that the guider does not block the CCD.

Acquistion

This is the process of the guider doing the following:

Taking an image
Finding the star
Calculating the offset of the star to the center
Offsetting the telescope

Guiding

This is not profoundly different from acquistion above, but it assumes a smaller offset from the center.

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