BAIT: acquire

NAME

acquire - finds the brightest star in a guide star and centers telescope

SYNOPSIS

acquire [nozero]

DESCRIPTION

acquire is a shell script which tries to put the guide star in the center of the field. First it takes a 5 second exposure of the small guide box and uses the centroid command to see if there is a target with a certain minimum brightness present. If there is, the telescope is offset to center the star and the procedure exits with a zero status code. If no star is present in the small box, acquire then takes a 20 second exposure, locates the stars, determines the brightest, then offsets the telescope to center it on the guider chip. If the acquisition is successful, the telescope is zeroed (see zero last command in the tx man page) to the last coordinate. If the acquisition fails, and the nozero flag is not specified, the telescope will point do a zero nearby and try again. If it still does not find a suitable star it will exit with a non-zero exit code.

If a guide star is found it will perform a couple of cycles using the guide auto command and determine the optimum value of the exposure time.