Spiral Search Suggestion

[BillR]

One of the things I struggle with (mightily) is locating a planet when imaging at 4000mm. My mounts are not on a fixed pier, so polar alignment and flexure often result in pointing errors. There are not enough stars in the frame to successfully platesolve, so I have to hunt for the target. A few nights ago, I spent hours trying to find Saturn.

I was thrilled to discover the Spiral Search feature in the Mount Control Movement section. This is an absolutely AWESOME feature! I've used it successfuly several times now to locate my target and sync my mount.

But I have a suggestion that I think would make it even better. The search "distance" (the amount it slews for each leg of the rectangular spiral) appears to be a small fraction of the frame. When I was using it a few nights ago, I could see a star tracing the rectangular spiral path within the frame until it eventually spiraled out of the frame. So the search path has a great deal of overlap on each leg of the spiral. Wouldn't it be more efficient if the amount of overlap was reduced to 10% or 20%?

I believe that SharpCap has enough information (focal length, image geometry) to compute the size of the frame in arc-minutes, so it should be able to compute this (maybe it already does). It would be nice if the user had the ability to control the amount of overlap, perhaps in a setting in the mount control section.

Thanks for listening,

Bill R