Simple use of the program

In order to find guide stars, the GSS needs to be told the telescope and focal station combination (referred to as the configuration), the position of the target and the position angle of the instrument rotator. The simplest option is to use the configuration defaults. To find stars for the WHT, use commands like the following:

$GSS
GSS>CONFIG WHT CASS
GSS>ROTATOR 90
GSS>SEARCH 12 34 56.23 30 00 02 J2000
GSS>EXIT
$TYPE OUTPUT.GS

This finds the brightest 10 guide stars available for the WHT Cass focus at the specified position for sky position angle . The position and probe coordinates for the guide star are given in OUTPUT.GS, which is the default output file name.

The next example shows how to increase the number of potential guide stars and to produce a plot of the results for the INT Prime focus.

$GSS
GSS>CONFIG INT PRIME
GSS>ROTATOR 180
GSS>NUMBER 50
GSS>DEVICE PERICOM_MG
GSS>SEARCH 23 23 24.56 45 56 23.1 B1950
GSS>PLOT
GSS>EXIT
$WHT_LASE OUTPUT.GS

produces a plot on Pericom terminal and prints the details on the laser-printer. To get a hard copy of the plot, use CANON_L as the device name, and use WHT_GLASE to print the resulting CANON.DAT file.

A complete list of the currently-supported configurations is given in the next section.