New DO IF BLOCK and extend dragscript variable scope

Greetings LO,

  1. DO IF based on meridian hour angle ? Would it be possible to add another DO IF construct for an Azimuth value or +/- hours each side of the Meridian. For a lot of targets the altitude value works well however with a bad light pollution dome I often want to image targets (eg. M81) when they are within a 2-3 hour range of the meridian which means they are nearly overhead. Setting the DO IF based on altitude means that I have to set the value fairly precisely for each target and work it out each time; by hour angle from the meridian is a lot easier to work with since the altitude wouldn’t need to be calculated each time. I appreciate there is already funtionality there that would do a similar thing in a different way (by altitude) but I believe this would be much easier and involve less working out. Hope that makes sense and apologies if this is a duplicate request.

  2. Would it be worth considering having a variable containing the Object name, RA and Dec that could be referenced by dragscript objects ? The reason I ask is that it would mean that a target could be defined once for an imaging block and referenced without any need to re-enter any of those three values individually. I guess what I’m thinking is that a block could have these values set and any subsequent dragscript components would be able to inherit those values via a tickbox/radio button. This might save hard coding anything anywhere apart from the dragscript variable.

I think someone else also mentioned populating RA/Dec values from a Planetarium - that would be a great timesaver - apologies if this can already be done (I haven’t found it yet). Quite often my targets are offset so I have to pick a GSC star and enter the co-ordinates manually.

I know you have masses of things you’re working on so I don’t want to pollute your mind with lots of unnecessary feature requests, on the other hand if you find any of these are useful ideas then it was worth writing them down.

Best wishes
Robert

Hello Robert,

  1. for me its ok … i can add block for azimuth and for HA
  2. great idea … i add this in the block where this data is needed

DragScript Editor doesn’t have actually access to controls in Voyager and cannot ask coordinates to planetarium. In DragScript you have pointing by name block and point by name with offset block. Was made for users do research. i can extend to sequence block if you think is good.

Hi LO,

  1. that’s great news.
  2. excellent that should save a lot of typing and or Control-C and V.

My thinking is that I don’t often have my target in the centre of field but offset in both RA and Dec. Quite often I will use a FOV indicator in TheSkyX or MaximDL to frame what I want then copy the co-ordinates - quite often those are contained in copy protected fields. It’s something that your Mosaic tool could could take the place of very well I hope - it all looks very promising. Personally I would use it mostly for framing but would then need some way of easily getting the co-ordinates into dragscript (the ‘object’ mentioned in request 2 above). Others will have different thoughts on this I’m sure.

Best wishes
Robert

I agree both of these will be nice additions.

The DO IF conditions for altitude is great. Is there a way to repeat the actions inside, or make it a DO WHILE loop? So I want to take RGB images with no set number, just keep taking them while the object is between the limits?

Thanks! Wayne

If you see the script i create for you you have the solution just ready… Just modify target and altitude to your need. Script is never ending , you can run it forever.

IN DO IF ALTITUDE choose your desiderata, in sequence block chose the minimum and maximum altitude for target. In sequene put a huge number of repeat of your sequence RGB.

All the best
LO

As I study it more, I’m getting more impressed with the scripting language. What I’m working on now is how to balance what it brings with the settings in the Sequence. Really fun to work with this program!

What I figured out was to create a named block, put in the Do If statement and all the things I want to do and ending it with jump to the block name. That worked great today doing lots of darks. Now maybe there’s a better way using a defined sequence in there and keep repeating it. Will have to study more.

Wayne

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