Astroart Forum

I’m trying to save images to a new directory that I create in the script using the date$() and create.directory functions.

It creates the directory fine

But I cannot see how to select this as the default directory to save the images into or how to automatically write the new directory into the save.image format.

I am trying to use the system clock to create the directory with the date then save the images on that session into the new directory

I can obviously write the directory name into the script but cannot work out how to do this automatically from within the script.

Is there a way to pick up to date RA and DEC from the MPC with the script directly accessing these. If I had a text list of the asteroid names can the program access the MPC and get accurate RA and DEC for telescope control or is there another way to do this?

Hi Wayne,
I solved this kind of problem defining a variable with the name of the directory where I intended to save the observation files.
In particular I used this code (some words are in Italian, however it's easy to understand):
QUOTE
oggi=today()
year=left(date,4)
ImgPath= "C:\Users\user\Pictures\"+year+"\"
SeqDir = ImgPath +oggi
SearchDir=FindDirs(ImgPath,oggi)
if SearchDir=oggi then
print "daily directory already exist"
else
CreateDir(SeqDir)
print "daily directory created"
endif
SeqDir=SeqDir+"\"
UNQUOTE
Please note that I'm using the default Windows directory tree ("C:\Users\user\Pictures"). The file are saved in a path such as "C:\Users\user\Pictures\2020\20201231\".
This works fine with Astroart 7 SP5.

Alessandro Maitan

Hi Wayne,
I forgot to add the code relevant to the file name:
QUOTE
ora=mid(UTDateTime(),9,4)
fileName = oggi+"-"+ora+SeqSep+name + SeqSep + flt+SeqSep+Format(idx,"000")+SeqSep+str(exp)+"s"
fileName=fileName+".fit"
UNQUOTE

Alessandro Maitan

About getting the coordinate of a minor planet from script (before doing that it's required to open the MPCOrb):

ra,de = ObjectCoordinates("Ceres")
print ra, de
ra,de = ObjectCoordinates("12289")
print ra, de

It's not safe to set and use the windows current directory. It's better to add the directory everytime you access a file. Here is an example:

Dir = "D:\Astro\Images\"

test = BuildFileName("M31", 5)
print test

Function BuildFileName(name,idx)
return Dir + name + "-" + Format(idx,"000") + ".fit"
End Function

Many thanks,

I will give these a try, it’s great that there is a way to pick things up from MPCOrb..

Wayne