Default directory and asteroid target list

[Wayne Hawley]

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?

[AlessandroMaitan]

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

[AlessandroMaitan]

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

[fabdev]

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

[Wayne Hawley]

Many thanks,

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

Wayne