[Kstars-devel] Re: INDI Time & Geographical settings

[Jasem Mutlaq]

On Friday 19 December 2003 12:36 am, Alessio Sangalli wrote:
> oh, my telescope is a Celestron. is this a hardware limitation of the
> celestron telescopes (protocol) or just an INDI issue that the driver is
> not mature enough?
>

It's a celestron issue. Celestrons don't support remote setting of time and 
location as far as I know.

> Another question; I would like to better understand what the "sync"
> action does. Sometimes, if the telescope is not very well aligned, when
> I ask kstars to slew to some object I have to manually adjust the
> telescope's position to center the object. If I watch on the screen then
> the indicator is slightly away from the object. I press the right button
> on the object again and I choose "sync". The indicator is now perfectly
> centered on the object.
> But what exactly happens this internally? Will kstars OR the telescope
> OR both OR nothing remember this syncronization so the next slewing
> action will be more accurate? I hope my question is clear.

You can refer to the Telescope chapter in the KStars manual 

http://docs.kde.org/en/HEAD/kdeedu/kstars/indi.html

Synchronizing your telescope

If you aligned your telescope and the last alignment star was, for example, 
Vega, then the crosshair should be centered around Vega. If the crosshair was 
off target, then you can right-click Vega from the sky map and select Sync 
from your telescope menu. This action will instruct the telescope to 
synchronize its internal coordinates to match those of Vega, and the 
telescope's crosshair should now be centered around Vega. 

> Another question would be: what's the difference between "slew" and
> "track"?
>

Good question, I'll try to clarify that in the FAQ after the string-freeze. 

Slew just asks the telescope to move to an object and then track sidereally. 
Track does the same job except that it "locks on" to the object. 

For sidereal objects, Slew/Track perform the same function. For non-sidereal 
objects (e.g. planets), slew only moves to the object, but track insures that 
it's being tracked properly.
 
Cheers,
Jasem