2026-10-05, 09:06 PM
Paul,
I think something I wrote has been misunderstood. I wasn't suggesting that you stop using Voyager, nor was I suggesting that you use SkyTools to control your equipment.
In fact, I answered your original question in the first paragraph: the SkyTools Scheduler provides the number of exposures you are looking for, along with the start and stop times. You can simply take that information and enter it into Voyager, which can then control your equipment exactly as it does now.
The point I was trying to make about scheduling was something different. SkyTools and Voyager are not doing the same calculations. The important distinction isn't how many constraints a scheduler supports, but the difference between scheduling by user-specified constraints and scheduling from a physical model of the expected imaging results.
Constraints are necessarily estimates. The user has to decide what constitutes an acceptable altitude or airmass, Moon distance, and so forth. But the optimum values depend on the target, imaging system, filter, sky conditions, and how all of those factors interact. Even something as basic as acceptable airmass can be quite different for blue than for red. Same for narrow band filters. How can you know how close to the moon you can image at different altitudes and phases... unless you can calculate the brightness of the sky at the target directly? Nobody can realistically account for all of those interactions by choosing a set of constraints.
SkyTools gets around that problem by modeling the expected SNR for your specific imaging system, target and filter as conditions change throughout the night. Rather than asking you to guess what constraints will produce good results, it directly calculates the expected quality of each expousre. It can therefore determine when it is most productive to image in each filter, including the appropriate start and stop times.
That's why I emphasized those start and stop times. A constraint-based scheduler without access to the SkyTools model cannot know the optimum boundaries for each filter. If it rearranges the exposures, much of the optimization SkyTools performed is lost. The result is either more imaging time required to obtain the same data, or less useful data from the same amount of imaging time.
I'm certainly not suggesting that Voyager doesn't work well for controlling your equipment, and your image is very nice. I'm only trying to explain what SkyTools is doing with the scheduling information and why I recommend preserving it when transferring the plan to Voyager.
And yes, I'd be interested in seeing what you've done with your spreadsheet. There may well be additional summary information that would be useful to expose directly in SkyTools.
Again, I feel it would benefit every user of Voyager greatly if the SkyTools schedule could simply be imported. Its actually a very easy thing for the developer to do.
I think something I wrote has been misunderstood. I wasn't suggesting that you stop using Voyager, nor was I suggesting that you use SkyTools to control your equipment.
In fact, I answered your original question in the first paragraph: the SkyTools Scheduler provides the number of exposures you are looking for, along with the start and stop times. You can simply take that information and enter it into Voyager, which can then control your equipment exactly as it does now.
The point I was trying to make about scheduling was something different. SkyTools and Voyager are not doing the same calculations. The important distinction isn't how many constraints a scheduler supports, but the difference between scheduling by user-specified constraints and scheduling from a physical model of the expected imaging results.
Constraints are necessarily estimates. The user has to decide what constitutes an acceptable altitude or airmass, Moon distance, and so forth. But the optimum values depend on the target, imaging system, filter, sky conditions, and how all of those factors interact. Even something as basic as acceptable airmass can be quite different for blue than for red. Same for narrow band filters. How can you know how close to the moon you can image at different altitudes and phases... unless you can calculate the brightness of the sky at the target directly? Nobody can realistically account for all of those interactions by choosing a set of constraints.
SkyTools gets around that problem by modeling the expected SNR for your specific imaging system, target and filter as conditions change throughout the night. Rather than asking you to guess what constraints will produce good results, it directly calculates the expected quality of each expousre. It can therefore determine when it is most productive to image in each filter, including the appropriate start and stop times.
That's why I emphasized those start and stop times. A constraint-based scheduler without access to the SkyTools model cannot know the optimum boundaries for each filter. If it rearranges the exposures, much of the optimization SkyTools performed is lost. The result is either more imaging time required to obtain the same data, or less useful data from the same amount of imaging time.
I'm certainly not suggesting that Voyager doesn't work well for controlling your equipment, and your image is very nice. I'm only trying to explain what SkyTools is doing with the scheduling information and why I recommend preserving it when transferring the plan to Voyager.
And yes, I'd be interested in seeing what you've done with your spreadsheet. There may well be additional summary information that would be useful to expose directly in SkyTools.
Again, I feel it would benefit every user of Voyager greatly if the SkyTools schedule could simply be imported. Its actually a very easy thing for the developer to do.
Clear skies,
Greg
Head Dude at Skyhound
Greg
Head Dude at Skyhound