Hi,
I have been using Voyager Advanced for a few days and am very satisfied. Explore a possibility: allow the generation of RoboTarget scheduling Gantt charts for checking errors caused by constraints and priority settings before performing astronomy nights.
Paul, using the ASCOM simulators is absolutely useless. An internal function that simulates the night as already written can be done but it might not be what will happen in reality.
However, if the purpose is to fix the constraints everytime (its ok to check the errors) this makes me think that you are not using the RoboTarget correctly. The constraints should not be adjusted to fill the night but to get the best data so they shouldn’t be subject to change and are always usually the same for ranges of target types and related to your observatory. Instead, you should have multiple targets configured if the constraints are very strict and have the patience to wait for the targets to finish, at least change the priority or work in 1 or 2 hour time slots if you want to distribute the shots.
Leo, I’m open the idea that I’m using it wrong, I always assume that’s the case.
The problem I am having is that, for example, two nights ago, during a completely clear (moonlit) night, I only managed to get 60 minutes of data despite having over 60 targets loaded into RT.
What I don’t know is why - which is where the planner or simulator might help me avoid wasting nights by either setting better constraints or selecting more appropriate targets (I suspect it has something to do with moon avoidance, but it’s difficult to know what’s going to happen until I wake up the next morning and even the I’m not sure why)
Most likely the majority of your targets are Broad Band or if Narrow Band, they are too close to the Moon. The Moon has been riding pretty high so that also reduces the distance to the majority of targets. Reclassify your targets as Free in the Lorentzian distance constraint and see how many actually run.