Release Notes for ACP Expert Scheduler V8.1

This is a minor release containing a few new features, improvements, and bug fixes that were discovered after release 8.0. It requires ACP 8.1 (not the service release to 8.0, the real ACP 8.1). If you are upgrading from V3.X or before, please read the 8.0 release notes! Several infrequently used features have been implemented by hashtags in the Description field of request elements. You should probably review Special Features in Text Fields right now.

New Features and Improvements

• If an unknown filter name is encountered in an ImageSet, the entire plan will fail. No longer will the configured "clear" filter be substituted.
• ACP Plan importing now recognizes the #nopreview directive and will suppress preview generation in the resulting Scheduler image acquisitions.
• Support is provided for defocused image acquisition. This can be useful for wide field systems with focus variation across the field. After focusing on the center of the field, the defocus can "split the difference" across the field, resulting in better overall focus. This is the same as the #defocus directive in ACP live plans. ACP Plan importing now recognizes the #defocus directive and will result in images being acquired with the specified defocusing.
• Support is provided for imager readout modes (such as RBI). Note that the ACP plan importer cannot import #readoutmode from ACP Plans because the compiler requires a live camera to validate the given readout mode. You will need to enter these manually after importing. This is implemented by the #romode directive in the ImageSet "description field".
• Tables in the Web Schedule Browser are now color coded for 100% completion (green), > 80% completion (orange), and any failures (red). The Observations and ImageSets tables now show which ones are currently running (white on red) like the Projects table.
• The (new) behavior of "aggregated autoguiding" has been documented.
• The Scheduler engine log now uses a sortable date-time format for its log line time stamping.
• If an ImageSet indicates auto-calibration, and the ACP "save raw images" option is enabled, the raw images will now be saved in a "RAW" subfolder under the folder containing the calibrated/final images.
• Debug level logging for rising plan delay has been improved, to make it easier to follow the actions taken.
• The web preview images are left in place/visible until a new image has been acquired.
• Emails for weather safe/unsafe events are no longer sent if the sun altitude is above the local horizon.

Changes and Fixes

• Autofocus now works with simple equatorial mounts (was producing "pier side not initialized" errors)
• CCD Navigator support for query and delete of projects now works with punctuation such as a comma in the site name
• If the dispatcher is started in the morning after sunrise, it will no longer start up and try to do dawn sky flats. It will try if the Sun is 2 or more degrees below the high flat limit.
• The Desktop and Web Schedule Browsers both have improved behavior for the Observation Time After and Tolerance fields, along with the Immediately After checkbox. Zero values in the time/tol boxes automatically set the immediate checkbox, and setting it zeroes the boxes. You won't get trapped in form validation now either.
• Logging of serious operator intervention errors has been clarified by reordering the info in the Engine Log.
• The behavior of autoguiding has been made more logical, particularly with regard to "aggregated exposure times" which now affect only a single ImageSet.
• The guider will now properly restart if it spontaneously stops during an ImageSet with Count > 1.
• An obscure error has been corrected in which rising plan delay would allow a Plan with a "must start before" time to rise beyond that time.
• The case where a weather unsafe event during system startup should be handled more resiliently now. There are probably sequences involving hardware and software dome/roof closing that will need more work. I have tried as many combinations as I can create here.
• Plan completion emails are now sent for "best efforts" plans which complete early.
• Plan completion emails are now sent to both the Project Owner/user and the Project Contact if the addresses are different.
• Settings file defaulting now works on Japanese systems for empty elements which should default.
• Help info for GMail setup corrected to remove explicit port 465 (which is obsolete).
• Cosmetic change a couple of "Simulated clock" logged messages to "Internal clock" to avoid confusion.

Release Notes for ACP Expert Scheduler V8.0

This is ACP Expert Scheduler Version 8.0, part of a major upgrade to both ACP and Scheduler. The version has been bumped to 8 to coincide with the "matching" version of ACP. It requires ACP 8.0. At a minimum please look over the items below, as they are really important especially for existing users upgrading!

New Features and Improvements

• Instead of saying "Dead" the Scheduler now advises that operator intervention is required when some malfunction prevents further operation. The email message has also been reworded to make this more clear, and to advise that the instruments may be exposed to the elements.
• The dispatcher will now insert Plans between linked Observations of running Plans if the Plan to be inserted will fit before the nominal start time of the upcoming linked Observation instead of the earliest time. Thus longer running Plans can be fit into the gaps between linked Observations of running Plans.
• The Schedule Browsers (desktop and web) now have different (and hopefully improved) Project controls. You can pause and resume projects without affecting the states of the Plans belonging to the project, and you can resubmit failed plans belonging to a project. Pausing a Project will not stop any of its running Plans.
• When a list of very similar Plans (such as those resulting from the Astro-Imaging form) are considered, the dispatcher now randomizes the list before picking the next one to do.
• The old image calibration controls are gone, replaced by a new "full calibration" control as well as a new "hot pixels" control. The calibraiton control uses the MaxIm Calibration Wizard that is used by ACP for its live runs, and the hot pixel c orrection uses the MaxIm filter for this. These control sare available on the Schedule Browser forma (both desktop and web). They will appear in the next release of ACP's web UI as well.
• The Schedule Browsers (desktop and web) now have new controls for duplicating Observations and ImageSets. The old behavior where a newly added ImageSet copies its info from the last one in sequence has been eliminated. Now you can create a copy of any ImageSet (and any Observation too!).
• The desktop Schedule Browser now warns you with a popup if you are navigating away from a record with unsaved changes, and gives you a choice of either updating it immediately or discarding the changes.
• A new command line option -s / -simulate forces the scheduler into simulation mode, and bypasses the need for a license, allowing the scheduler to run stand-alone for testing and evalation purposes.
• A new option Close-If-Idle has been added to cause the scheduler to close the dome/roof if no work appears to be coming up for n hours. This feature can be disabled.
• The AutoFocus logic now avoids flipping the mount to get to the high-in-sky focus position, and the altitude has been reduced to 70 deg to assure that there is plenty of time to focus if looking east (tracking towards the west).
• The web Schedule Browser now displays all of the requests for all Observers/Users in the Projects, Plans and Observations tables, allowing everyone to see to the totality of requests in the system, while still only allowing an individual User's requests to appear for editing in the tree.
• The web Schedule Browser has a new modern light theme look, and the CSS styles have been refactored in preparation for possible light/dark style switching.
• During startup and when switching modes (simulator vs ACP) a popup "Please wait..." box now helps understand what's happening.
• Sky flat timing is now controlled by the SunHi and SunLo altitudes in the ACP AutoFlatConfig file. This avoids long periods of the AutoFlat script waiting for the sun angle, and also if those angles are tuned, avoids excessive test exposures.
• If the Scheduler has an available update, a new indicator will appear at the upper right corner. If visible, clicking on it will open the web page for downloading the newer version of the Scheduler.
• If a serious error occurs requiring operator intervention, an attempt will now be made to close the dome or roof. If the roof is "special needs" the special needs script will be used as usual.
• It is now possible to suppress generating web preview images for increased observing efficiency. This is automatically included in POSS-mode imported ACP plans.
• The sample startup and shutdown scripts have been modernized. The DigitalLoggers switch example now uses the new ASCOM.DigitalLoggers.Switch driver. A new sample is provided for the SynAccess NetBooter NP8 and similar models. These switches can be controlled with simple HTTP GET requests.
• Testing dawn cal frames and flats (if set for screen'panel flats) are now possible in unsafe weather. Weather will be disconnected during these tests.
• The Moon Avoidance constraint will no longer veto if the Moon is down, regardless of how close the target is to the moon.
• The Moon Down altitude is now adjustable. This primarily affects the MoonDown constraint.
• Sky flats no longer pay attention to the sky condition input. They will run regardless. Some sky condition monitors report "poor" for daylight!!
• The license entry window now does live checking of the info, lights the OK button only when it is correct, and pops a balloon to indicate that the OK button will light only when OK.
• The license entry window now shows an existing license if there.
• Unless disabled in the ACP preferences, a pre-slew will be initiated to the target in the next Observation if it is scheduled "immediately after". This pre-slew will be started before image download is started. This was done to maximize observaing efficiency in high-cadence operations such as the Puckett Observatory Supernova Search
• On errors requiring operator intervention, it is now possible to specify a command line program (with arguments) that will be run in this case. This allows great flexibility in reporting serious errors at the observatory.
• Several major ehhancements to importing of ACP observing plans have been added:
  • Special format comments in the input plan allow controlling the Scheduler constraints applied to the resulting Observations, as well as controlling the priority of generated Plans. All of the standard Scheduler constraints are supported.
  • Now honors the #DIR directive for forcing images belonging to the subsequent generated ImageSets into a specific directory.
  • Now honors the #SUBFRAME directive for forcing images belonging to the subsequent generated ImageSets into a specific directory. This is done with temporary method of putting #SUBFRAME 0.nn into the ImageSet's Description field. This will be integrated in a future release.
  • Now honors the #NOSOLVE directive for preventing plate solving of final images belonging tothe subsequent generated ImageSets. This is done with temporary method of putting #NOSOLVE into the ImageSet's Description field. This will be integrated in a future release.
  • A new POSS Mode of importing has been added. This mode is specifically designed to import the ACP plans generated by the Pucket Observatory Supernova Search system. These plans are large lists of galaxy targets grouped into "grids" which are indicated by the presence of #DIR directives. The POSS mode of importing groups the galaxy targets of each grid into its oen Scheduler Plan, so that the groups of galaxies (grids) are imaged as a unit, all or nothing, as required by the POSS pipeline.
• If you have code that uses the XML_RTML23 COM object for constructing RTML, note that this component is deprecated. It will been replaced with the new DC3.RTML23.RTML object. This single component contains .NET native and COM support for reading and writing RTML, as well as importing RTML into the Schedule database. This sweeping refactoring of the RTML implementation is in preparation for a forthcoming set of changes to RTML itself. This version contains a Software Development Kit (SDK) for RTML Generation.
• When creating a new Project in both the desktop and web schedule browsers, the contact email and organizaton is taken from the User/Observer's info.
• XML-Importing and exporting of Projects, Plans, Observations, and ImageSets forces their status to Disabled (Paused for Projects). THis prevents importing running Plans, and provides expected behavior.
• Specific documentation for sending email via GMail has been added.
• The simulator sequencer now allows specifying (in the config window) whether or not the simulated observatory has a dome or roof.
• The documentation of periodic autofocus now states that the autofocus checkbox will be hidden in web submission and edit forms if periodic autofocus is in effect.
• Users and projects created from the ACP web forms now have better User and Contact information derived from the RTML, and the Description field now imports properly.

Changes and Fixes

• StartupObs and ShutdownObs scripts, as well as Scheduler-specific file/folder customization config files ImageFileConfig and LogFileConfig, have moved to Public Documents\ACP Config\Scheduler, in keeping with the security model of Windows 7 and later. If Scheduler finds any of these files in the old Program Files\ACP Scheduler location it will immediately move it to the new location.
• The non-availability and availability of weather is now logged only when it changes, not every few seconds!
• It is no longer possible for an error coming from the external Sky Condition server (not the weather server) to get the scheduler into a state where neither the Exit menu nor the [X] box can be used to exit (instead of incorrectly popping the "supervisor" balloon). This was one very obscure bug!
• Various failures on creating the sky condition server object is now handled in a clean way, and results in an "operator intervention required" state.
• The ACP setting "Always solve fiinal images" is now honored by Scheduler. If a final image solve fails on a given target, solving will still be attempted on subsequent exposures of that target.
• The filter and binning lists in the web schedule browser's filter droplist now get their values from the ACP cache. It is no longer necessary to manually create and maintain separate lists.
• A crash of the Desktop Browser after using the Utility menu "delete all completed plans" has been fixed. The project tree is now properly refreshed after this mass deletion.
• Preposterous temperature values (coming from brand "S" cameras) with the cooler off are now ignored during substitution of file name tokens.
• The desktop and web schedule browsers now funciton properly with systems using the comma as decimal point. For web users, input may be using comma or period since the culture of the local system may differ from that of the remote observatory running ACP.
• It is no longer possible to have a surprise (and unnoticed) flip on a re-center slew with "just the right" amount of time before a flip.
• The BoltwoodFile weather server now considers VeryLight an unsafe weather condition. This was done for the direct CLarity server in ACP 7.2.
• When importing RTML (manually or via the ACP web UI forms) it is no longer necessary to have at least two Observers in the database for the requests to be created under the ACP user's name.This was a hangover from the old single-observer scheduler version which is now gone.
• The logic for starting a run in ACP has been made more robust with respect to non-scheduler tasks being run on ACP at the same time.
• The desktop schedule browser now interacts with the database and does exporting and importing of its native XML under Cultures with comma decimal point.
• The Observation editor in the web scheduler browser now suggests 120/14 for Moon Avoidance.
• The Observation editor in the web schedule browser now allows up to +/- 12 hours for Hour Angle.
• If the dispatcher engine fails to initialize for whatever reason, it will no longer result in a "zombie" Scheduler.exe process remaining in execution.
• If scheduler and ACP are of incompatible versions, scheduler will now just switch to Simulation mode instead of crashing. This allows entry of updated license, and also running separately without ACP at all for research. In this case no license is required.
• The Moon Avoidance Lorentzian constraint will now always allow if the Moon is down, regardless of its distance from the target.
• The desktop and web schedule browsers havw been fixed so that creation and alteration of items in running Plans are disabled or hidden.
• Another case where files for a local observer were stored under the web folder tree for user "_" was discovered and fixed. The previous fix was determined to be inadequate on inspection this time. The problem is truly stamped out now!
• ACP's "dispatcher enabled" property is positively set to false at startup and shutdown of the scheduler progrm. This prevents a surprise dispatcher startup when ACP is started.
• The Scheduler components have been migrated from .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5. In addition, all components are now built with Visual Studio 2010. Both of these changes bring additional stability and speed both during development and also at run time. This was a sweeping change, and was done for maximum compatibility with newer versions of Windows.
• The installer now creates the installation directory data in the registry, allowing other tools to run before the Schedler is first started afetr installation.
• The ACP Plan compiler (used during importing of ACP plans) no longer logs possible multiple spurious blank lines.
• The desktop browser now properly refreshes Observations below a Plan which is Disabled or Resubmitted. The ImageSets were being refreshed but not the Observations.
• Giant error messages can no longer cause script errors due to exceeding the 256 character length limitation for errors in the scheduler database.
• Added a notation in the configuration form that a change to the sky server requires a scheduler restart.

Release Notes for Scheduler V3.7

This release is mostly for proper handling of panel/screen flats, and for numerous ACP programming API additions that occurred between ACP 7.1 and ACP 7.2. The fact that ACP and Scheduler are now released as a matched set has greatly eased the process of making additions to ACP's programming API!

New Features and Improvements

• The ACP web user interface now allows controlling of dispatcher enabled/disabled (for ACP administrators) as well as viewing of the dispatcher status.
• The evening and morning tasks have been streamlined, and support for panel/screen flats has been added (this was a major task).
• $TEMP can now be used as a substitution token in custom file names for images.
• If the "open time" setting is entered as a negative number, it will now be interpreted as the time before astronomical twilight instead of local sunset. This can be useful at high latitudes in summer where the sun sets very slowly!
• The name of the successful or failed Plan is now included in the subject of Plan completion emails.
• Documentation for the Moon Avoidance constraint has been improved and now contains a live spreadsheet that can be used to visualize the effect of the distance and width parameters. Thanks to ACP Expert user Dick Berg for the spreadsheet idea. The spreadsheet is in the desktop schedule browser help and also the ACP web UI help for Moon Avoid.
• The dispatcher modes have been documented.

Changes and Fixes

• Open-Before time is no longer restricted to an integral number of hours (this was a bug)
• The folder My Documents\ACP Astronomy\Scheduler is now created (if needed) by the installer. This is used by StartupObs but not created. Rather than making people add code to StartupObs I just create the folder in the installer.
• Several places where a weather interrupt was causing "ACP busy with weather safety" or unexpected dome status (closing due to hardware/software weather event) have been resolved by making the scheduler wait for completion of the weather safety script. Now it is required, in the weather safety script, that it wait for any dome or roof activity to complete.
• Accommodations have been made for "special needs" buildings which need special action in order to safely close the roof or whatever. If you have a special needs building (like a low-hanging roll off) where you can't just "close up", you now need to supply Scheduler with a special script CloseSpecialRoof which will get your building closed safely. This release (7.2) of Scheduler includes a template for this. This is used to close up before doing dawn cal frames.
• Several small corrections to the documentation have been made.
• Autofocus is documented to take place at 70 degrees elevation in the east.
• If the pointing update is skipped for a short slew (less then max w/o pointing update) it now checks to see if a flip is needed on GEM scopes.
• HTML control characters (&, <, >, etc.) in Project, Plan, Observation and/or Image Set names no longer cause the web schedule browser's tree to fail.
• Internal changes for the change in ACP's Util.IsGEMDestinationWest() method, which now takes Declination.
• Compatibility with the ACP 7.2 programming API
• The SkyMath report file has been moved to My Documents to avoid failures on Win 7/8 with UAC on.
• The exit menu and [x] box will now block the user from closing the program during some critical cleanup events. When the [x] box is used in this state, a balloon will appear telling the user to wait a bit and try again.

Older release notes (pre-3.7)