Hi Kevin I have an SLT mount like yours and have been meaning to try out plane scans on it, but because my homemade system is much more user friendly I just havent got around to it so maybe you could check the following out: I have a piece of software that computes a plane scan written for me by Thierry Marais and at the time he asked me not to distribute it as it was still a beta version. I have used it many times over the past 7-8 years and its works. Thierry has disappeared and I dont have his current email address so Im not sure whether I am still confined to the "not distributing clause". Thierry last lived in Paris - does anyone perhaps know his current email address ? Anyway this program generates a text table of azimuth and elevation at specified times . My homemade mount then reads the az/el and at the specified time sets the camera at this position and then "tracks" the orbit plane at an interval step that I define - usually every 60 seconds or so. The duration of the orbit scan can be anything - from a few minutes to hours if necessary. So this program is available- subject to Thierry's permission. It runs under Dos and uses the standard TLE format. Forget the size offhand but probably around 100K. I dont have the source code. So the next step is to get the SLT mount to read an ascii table and track on this. I think the solution for this already exists. Have a look at the latest version of RTGUI V9.2 -- its freeware and easily found using Google. In the latest version the author - Robert Sheaff - has added the facility of driving an SLT scope in alt/az at specific intervals - not for satellite tracking - but astronomical use. I have not yet gotten around to trying this facility out so dont know how compatible it is with plane scan requirements but dont think there should be any problems. A typical ascii table looks like 02:00:00 345.678 34.567 02:01:00 346.452 33.453 02:02:00 347.345 32.678 02:03:00 347.945 31.456 ........................................... 04:00:00 023,234 15.234 first column is time, second column azimuth and third column elevation. (I "sucked" the above figures out of my thumb ) If you have a chance check out RTGUI and see if it will work with something like this - of course any ascii table can be "massaged" to fit the format required by RTGUI. Hope this helps Cheers Greg _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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