Computer System

My computer setup consists of P60 with 24M of RAM in the observatory and a 233 MHz K-6 machine with 32M of RAM in the house, both running Windows 95. The P60 controls the SBIG ST-7 camera and the LX-200.

The two computers are connected with a 30m UTP cable using generic Ethernet network cards to transfer image files from the P60 to the K-6 machine. All image files are transferred into the K-6 machine in the house for saving and processing.

I run Guide 6 in a separate window on the P60 machine to control the LX-200 and it works great! I locate my target asteroids in Guide 6, click on 'Slew Telescope' and the LX-200 goes right to my target.

I run another copy of CCDOPS on the K-6 machine to do the preliminary processing of each image received from the observatory: dark subtract, flat field, remove hot pixels (medium), remove cold pixels (medium), and smooth (medium). The processed image is saved back to a dedicated directory (using the date in yymmdd format as the directory name, eg, 980507).

I measure asteroid positions using Bill Gray's Charon, again running in a separate window. I use my own image processing program to align and blink image pairs to look for new asteroids, comets, or asteroids that are too far away from their predicted positions for Charon to successfully find them.