Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Sat, 08/25/2012 - 19:10

I am getting started with ccd photometry and have AIP4Win.  I have looked through the threads of this topic and have not seen any explination of why one might prefer to use VHOT, which requires uploading images, over AIP4Win?   Thanks for any insight.

 

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Some scenarios to consider

Some scenarios to consider:

- You are using images from an AAVSONet scope.  They end up in your VPHOT account the next morning...already calibrated.  Not too many more steps before you have data extracted from the images, and a pre-formatted report generated in VPHOT.

- You have your own rig, and you take 1000 images each night...long-time-series of one/two/three targets.  On your PC you can calibrate all the images, extract the data and submit it...probably faster than you can upload 1000 images to VPHOT.

The first scenario is a good reason to use VPHOT.

The second scenario is a good reason to use AIP4WIN on your PC.

There are other scenarios in between these, but keep in mind that VPHOT will plate solve images and show you available comp stars/sequence information.  AIP4WIN currently does not have that capability.

I hope this helps.