Importing a Mosaic from TheSky™

Once in a while you may want to acquire images in a mosaic. Software Bisque's TheSky has an excellent set of tools for calculating mosaics and showing you the frames against its virtual sky. ACP Planner can take the results of a mosaic from TheSky and create a set of targets in its observing plan (along with other targets that may already be in the plan). It's really easy. Let's see how.

Creating the Mosaic

In TheSky, center on your area of interest, then open the Mosaic tool (Tools menu, Mosaic). Consult the TheSky help for details on using this tool. We recommend that you turn on the Visible option. With this option on, clicking Apply will cause the mosaic frames to be shown in TheSky.

If you have an imager rotator, display the FOV indicator for your imager in TheSky, rotate it, and then click "Get geometry from My FOVI" to set the tool for your imager. If you rotate the FOVI, the generated mosaic will be at the FOVI's PA. As you'll see, you can tell Planner what the PA is, allowing ACP to rotate your imager to match.

In the Advanced tab of TheSky's Mosaic tool, note the Replicate area. These controls allow you to generate an asymmetric mosaic by replicating the basic mosaic you create in the Geometry tab in steps to the left, right, above, and below the basic mosaic. Play with this feature, clicking Apply to see the effects of adding replications, until you understand how it works. This is a power feature that adds considerable flexibility to the basic Mosaic tool.

Importing the Mosaic

Once you have the mosaic set up to your liking in TheSky:

1. Switch to the Advanced tab in the Mosaic tool.
2. Click the Copy to Clipboard button.
3. Alt-Tab to switch to ACP Planner (or start it if needed).
4. In the File menu, select Import Mosaic... The Planner "Import Mosaic" window will appear (you'll see an error popup if you forgot to copy the mosaic data to the clipboard).
5. Your first task is to specify the images to be taken for each frame of the mosaic (they will be the same for all frames). Use an existing preset or click Presets... and create a new one for this run.
6. If you have an imager rotator, you'll need to enter the PA so ACP can rotate the imager to the correct equatorial PA for the mosaic. Enter the same value here as you specified during construction of the mosaic in TheSky.
7. Specify the time (local) at which you want acquisition of the mosaic frames to begin. The time must be in the future, of course, and the initial time shown is the ending time of the last target in your plan, or 10 minutes from now if you have no targets in your plan. See below for more information.
8. If you are acquiring multiple images of each mosaic frame, you can tell the observatory to "dither" the images slightly. For astro-imaging, this can sometimes improve the quality of the stacked images.
9. (optional, only if you are exporting to ACP Scheduler) Enter the minimum altitude at which ACP Scheduler will allow observations of the mosaic frames.
10. Click Import to add the mosaic frames to your plan and automatically calculate their start times based on the time each frame is expected to take.

Mosaics are always added to the end of your plan, so the start time shown is the earliest you can start the mosaic (the ending time of the last target in the list, or ten minutes from now). Use TheSky and TheSky Plan Capture to roll time back and forth and visualize where the mosaic will be in the sky tonight. Pick a good time to start it based on your guess of how long it will run. You can adjust it later using Planner's . If you set the time in the future from the initial "earliest" time, you will be able to insert other targets in the gap if you want.