How does Asimoplan work?
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Asimoplan floats a mosaic outline over your sky atlas display screen. Once it has been designed you can then use the mosaic to very precisely aim your imaging camera for each frame in the mosaic.
Defining your camera and optical train Before you can create a mosaic you will need to provide Asimoplan with the details of the shape and imaging size of your camera's imaging frame. You can do this for each camera that you use. Once provided, these details are filed and are then available for repeated use. The camera's shape obviously remains constant and is held in a Camera record. But a camera's imaging height depends on the optical train to which the camera is attached and so a separate Optical Train record is created for each camera / optical train permutation that you use. Designing the mosaic You start by selecting the object to be imaged using your sky atlas program and then you design a mosaic over the top of that object. You first use Asimoplan's calibration frame to identify the scale of the sky atlas display. Then you specify the required number of frames across and down and the extent to which the frames shall overlap each other. Each time that you make a change you can immediately see its affect on the amount of sky that your finally assembled mosaic will cover. Using the mosaic Once you have designed your mosaic Asimoplan will calculate and report the right ascension and declination coordinates at the center of each frame. This lets you use your imaging camera's mount to aim the camera for each frame in turn. And because you can see the field stars, etc. displayed by your sky atlas underneath each frame you can very precisely fine tune your camera's aim. Once you have imaged a frame you can record the imaging date and time for future reference. Exporting frame coordinates The calculated right ascension and declination coordinates can be exported to a text file in any of a number of different formats. This will let you pass the coordinates on to some other imager such as a remote imaging system |