Testing the KStars internal guider

Hy Murveit murveit at gmail.com
Sun Aug 22 08:35:38 BST 2021


FYI, I made some significant changes to the internal guider on my fork of
kstars.

https://invent.kde.org/education/kstars/-/merge_requests/394
This is currently in the form of a Draft MR.

>From my perspective, the main changes are code-related: hopefully I've
refactored it so that it will be much easier to modify in the future, and
more testable. I've added a significant calibration test. I'd like to
follow up with refactoring dithering, but one thing at a time.

>From a user perspective, the major changes are:
- the control subtab is gone. those controls are now in the guider's
options menu
- dec and ra (non-gpg) guiding now use a control gain that varies from 0.0
to 1.0. The old ~133 thing is gone. That gain multiplies the calibrated
pulse-milliseconds-per-arcsecond-of-movement and the current drift to
compute the control pulse. This is standard and more in line with other
guiders, e.g. PHD2. GPG did this all along.
- I've exposed another calibration parameter (max-move in pixels). Now you
can adjust the pulse length, the maximum number of iterations, and the
maximum number of pixels (approximate) moved.

If you are good at getting code off of git repos, and want to test this,
then "git clone
https://invent.kde.org/murveit/kstars.git" and go to the guider-fix9 branch
(git checkout guider-fix9), and compile that. It is currently at HEAD with
this mod. It could use testing--I've done a lot of simulator testing, and
really worked on the calibration unit test, but it's been very
cloudy/smokey around here...

Please let me know if you get to it, haven't sent anything out to the forum
yet.
Hy

PS I'm happy to take suggestions of further algorithmic improvements, but I
thought we really needed some simplification to this code before I did that.
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