iTelescope.Net - The Punisher - Lets Talk Guiders

The reason why the remote telescopes can take a little time to find a guide star is because we don't have control over where the telescope is slewing next. We can be in a star field full of stars (so many stars that guider can't lock onto one), the next session may have only a handful of very very dim stars.  

When you have your own system, you can plan for such events and you are sitting beside it making adjustments, at GRAS we have to assume nothing and be ready for everything, we have 4500 subscribers wanting to do their own thing. All aspects of astronomy from science to the full range of imaging CCD work.

As you know we use ACP, however ACP has been re-written by me from the ground up to deal with the tough iTelescope environment.  This code has had about 3 years worth of work put into it and is based largely on 100,000+ user transactions we have delivered. It looks nothing like the original ACP code.

Hopefully this gives you some insight into why things do not seem as straight forward as they should be.

On top of that we are dealing with lots of software that doesn't work correctly or has some bug in it that we have to work around. No vendor wants to touch or update these programs, as they only seem to happen on the iTelescope network.

Some well known CCD software application doesn't want to detect guide stars from time to time even when we have a nice star on the autoguider ccd. This means I have to fall back to other methods of detecting guide stars.

We are often asked "...why not use these other brand X guiders?"

Unfortunately we are the hardware vendors worst nightmare. iTelescope does things to their equipment that they never dreamed of during the design process.

Most guiders are not up to spec for 24x7 remote telescope operation, they have runtime errors in their drivers that develop over a few days of constant use and the hardware only has a life expectancy of around 60+ days, as their internal components aren't specced for our conditions. We have tested other guiders twice, both in Spain and in Australia, during these times we went through 2-3 cameras in a matter of about 6 weeks and after about 1 day of operation the guider driver software just died, causing scripts to abort when the autoguider tries to start.

As an example of this many of the high end CCD vendors have developed or are in the process of developing internal components that can deal with 24x7x365 day operation under conditions of 50c to –30c as these are the swings iTelescope can get from site to site.

Other things that people don’t consider is that we have to leave our CCD cooled 24x7.  If we don't do this, after about 4 months the CCD seals break or split. Then we need to get them replaced. That means downtime.

We are dealing with all these issues quietly in the background and our customers are non the wiser.

Brad.