Routine Use: Standalone

While ACP Planner is designed to work best within Starry Night or TheSky, you can still run it by itself then add targets and their image sets manually.

Starting a new ACP Plan

Start up ACP Planner by double-clicking its icon or selecting it from your Start menu. If you've just finished creating and saving a plan, you can start another (new) one by selecting New Plan in the File menu.

Adding and Editing targets

See Adding and Editing Targets.

Dusk and Dawn Flats Options

You should look at Automatic Sky Flats before using these options. If you enable either or both of the the Take Flat Fields options for your plan, ACP Planner will include a command to start the ACP automatic sky-flat system at the beginning and/or send of the plan. If you select dusk flats, you must start your observing before dusk twilight; a half hour before sunset will do. Also, do not delete the first #waituntil directive in the plan, or your imaging will start right after the dusk flats. Not a good time! If you select dawn flats, your imaging must end early enough for the dawn flats to be acquired before the sun gets too high. If you're doing in-planetarium planning, this should be easy to determine. After your imaging completes, the dawn flat process will simply wait until the sky conditions are right for acquiring your flats. If your imaging runs too long, the dawn flats will simply be skipped (and you'll have some washed out images too!).

The observatory operator should have already set up ACP's automatic sky-flat system to take a standard set of dawn flats. Confirm this.

Saving Your Plan

Once you have completed your night's plan, you need to save it to a text file for input to ACP.

1. In the File manu, select Save as...
2. If you want to add any comments at the top of your plan, enter them into the Add Comments window that first appears.
3. Click OK to close the Add Comments window.
4. Next the File/Save-as window will appear. The first time you use the Planner, you'll notice that the save window is already located in the My Documents\ACP Astronomy\Plans folder. This is where ACP looks for plans by default (assuming you are running ACP locally). Thereafter, it remembers the folder into which you saved the previous plan.
5. If needed, select a folder then give your plan file a name and save it.
6. If you have ACP installed on your computer, you'll now be asked if you want to run your plan in ACP now. If you have ACP, MaxIm, and your observatory instruments running and ready to go, click the checkbox and then answer Yes -- the plan will start. It will, of course, wait until the start time of the first object or dusk flat time (if you selected dusk flats).

   If not, and you answer No:

   1. Next, you'll see your ACP plan file appear in Notepad. If you want, give it a last check here. You can make last minute changes to image set specs. It's pretty easy to understand. But if the format is a bit daunting, don't worry, just close Notepad.
   2. At this point, you can either run your plan in ACP whenever, or upload it via the web and run it remotely.

Creating a Flat Plan (advanced users)

If you're an advanced user and want to create a flat plan for your observing plan, ACP Planner can do this by scanning your plan and making a flat plan that acquires just the flats needed to calibrate the images in your observing plan. For more information on this, see Automatic Sky Flats and Flat Planning.