[Aavso-photometry] Info on Equinox & Got my Mac

[bailyhill at aol.com]

Hello Justin

I think that rallying around EquinoX is certainly a good thing.  I have 
the software, and have successfully run the planetarium portion--its 
really very good.

I have also gotten a trial SBIG camera driver, and tried it, and it 
works very well.  It seems to have most of the camera control features 
that are present in Maxim.  I have taken some indoors trial images with 
my ST-10MXE.  It does control the filter wheel, camera main chip, auto 
guide chip, and focussing.  It also supports telescope control for 
lx200, and next star, Takahashi Temma, Robofocus, Optec TCF-S, and 
webcams.  No FLI digital focusser and no Tak Mewlon AALOS support, and 
no plans to start them.

Daryll is waiting for the Mac-Intel details to shake out.  He has many 
lines of code that he has just finished, and does not want to rewrite 
it for Intel chips.  We will see how this is.

Thanks for all the advice on Macs from the previous post.  I went for 
the imacG5--1gig ram, 17 inch screen, 1.8 gHz processor, 600 Mhz 
frontside buss, 160 Gig hard drive, combo dvd rom and cd r/w drive, 
built in wireless and blue tooth.  I am just starting to get familiar 
with it.  It is not a laptop, but just like telescopes, there are 
portables and movables.  This is an all in one, 17x17x2 inch unit 
without keyboard or mouse.  The keyboard and mouse can be wired or 
wireless.  Went with the wire--wireless is a battery hog and sounds a 
little unreliable from what apple's web site said.  The whole thing was 
$1399--so I went with it.  The extra power may be of some future use.  
Decided that I do not use the laptop features as much as I used to, I 
still have the Dell, and can move my G5 if necessary.

Also considered the mini, and ibooks, and powerbooks, but non were in 
stock.  In fact I got the last iMacG5 they had.

Clear Skies

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby at users.sourceforge.net>
To: aavso-photometry at mira.aavso.org
Sent: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:23:25 -0400
Subject: ccdacq (was: Re: [Aavso-photometry] Advice on Mac Models)

   On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 12:51:13PM -0500, Michael Koppelman wrote:
> In my personal opinion, a VirtualPC-type solution is a workaround and 

> not something I would create a plan around. Perhaps if enough of us
> Mac-types rallied around the EquinoX stuff we could get a better
> commitment from them to support their software going forward. IRAF
> does have some image acquisition capabilities...?
TTBOMK, the extent of IRAF's acquisition abilities are some external
packages (ICE, ccdacq [0]) which end up calling UNIX programs to do
their work, after a very indirect callchain..

--
Clear skies,
Justin

References

[0] http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/ftp/iraf/extern-v211/ice.readme
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