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ACP Planner™ (Patent Pending) gives you a way to create a night's single-target or multiple target observing plan within Starry Night or TheSky, or all by itself. An ACP plan is just a list of targets with image/filter specs and optional timing info (which Planner automatically sets up!). There's no need to tell ACP to slew, take images, focus, guide, etc., because it's smart enough to figure out what things are needed and when.
It's vital to understand that, with ACP, planning and observing are separate processes and use separate programs. Planner is for planning, and ACP is for observing. Planner can run anywhere, even on an airplane while travelling. ACP runs in the observatory (in your backyard or remotely somewhere else). If you're using another automation tool such as CCDAutoPilot or CCDCommander, we suggest you have a look at the ACP Home Page for more information. There are videos to watch, feature descriptions, and much more . From time to time we run upgrade specials that will allow you to recoup your cost for those tools and gain the advantages of ACP.
Before using Planner, you need to configure it for your observatory. See Getting Started, then come back here.
Select the topic that matches your setup.
In-planetarium planning is a quantum leap beyond other tools and automation systems because it lets you visualize your target positions and timing together dynamically and do task-oriented planning. It makes it very easy to pick which targets to image at what times and for how long. There are no complicated forms to fill out with angles, times, etc. Just specify your images.
Whether you use Starry Night or TheSky, ACP Planner works in basically the same way. You work in the planetarium, selecting targets to observe at the times you want to observe them, and these are added to the "collector". As you add targets, you also specify the images to be taken. ACP Planner constantly recomputes the time needed to observe each target in the collector's list and jumps the planetarium time ahead for you!
As you roll time back and forth (using the mouse-wheel or Starry Night's Graph tool), targets move across the sky and a "guide display" tells you whether there's an active observation at the time, or how long it will be until the next observation will start, or that the remainder of the night is free. Thus, you can easily visualize which targets are in a favorable position at what times, how much time is available to insert a target between ones already selected, or start a new one at the end of the list.
When you're finished adding targets and setting up images, simply save the observing plan (File/Save As...). At this point, if you have ACP installed, and it is ready for automated imaging, you can have your plan started automatically. Or you can save it for later running or uploading to a remote ACP observatory. Load the Plan into ACP or upload it to the remote ACP observatory and start it. That's all there is to it! now read Routine Use: Starry Night or Routine Use: TheSky, whichever one you use.
If you don't have or want to use a planetarium, that's OK. You can also add targets directly to ACP Planner's collector, specifying the name, time, coordinates, and optionally the rotator angle. You'll still get the benefit of Planner's time calculations. Each target you add will automatically be set for the finishing time of the previous one (you can adjust this to create gaps in time if you wish!). If you want to use Planner by itself, see Routine Use: Standalone.
You can also use ACP Planner to create observing requests in Robotic Telescope Markup Language (RTML). This is ACP Scheduler's request input format. For more information on using ACP Planner with ACP Scheduler, see Exporting as RTML for ACP Scheduler.