I have been using CCDAP3 recently to take series of exposures of asteroids to try to construct animations and, unless I am really missing something, CCDAP3 could use some modifications to help it do this.
What I would like it to do is take an exposure (or a few exposures), wait for an interval, and repeat. For example, let's take three exposures of 3 minutes each, wait 20 minutes and then repeat the series of three and then keep repeating this sequence for as long as I want.
Maybe there is some way to do this in CCDAP3 that I am not aware of.
Right now, I accomplish this by taking a long series of exposures ( let's say three minute exposures x 100) and compressing the time sequence by only using every 20th or 30th exposure.
If there is some way todo this, could someone please point it out to me.
If it can't be done, can I suggest this as a feature to add to CCDAP in the future.

Thanks,

Pat Cirullo

Hi Pat,

I assume your exposures are unguided. The best way to accomplish what you want it to enter the exposures you want in a given series, select a guide exposure (that will be unused) and then set the guide exposure delay factor so that the product of guide exposure and guide exposure delay factor equals the inter-exposure delay. In your example, set series 1 exposures for 3 x 3 minutes. Set your guide exposure to 15 seconds and set the guide exposure delay factor to 80. Then set the number of light sets for how many times you want the sequence of 3 x 3 minute exposures followed by a 20 minute delay to repeat.

If I understand what you want, the above should do it.

Pat,

I thought about this during the past eclipse. I thought how nice it would have been to take a 1/10 sec exposure every 5 minutes to capture the eclipse for a video.

Beside the interval imaging requirement I would have needed the capacity to change the tracking rate to lunar as well to keep it on the chip.

Hi Chris,

I don't plan on incorporating tracking rate changes in CCDAP at present. You may be able to set that manually in your telescope control program for those one-off kind of events and use the guide exposure/guide exposure delay factor to set an interval delay. This was described earlier in a post to another user.