Here at Lowell Observatory, we had one of our public program volunteers suggest the following after having a bit of GOTO accuracy issues one night. We use Sky Safari to control all six of the telescopes in the new Giovale Open Deck Observatory.
The idea:
If after performing a GOTO with Sky Safari and the object is outside the telescope's FOV and too dim to appear in the finder, hitting GOTO a second time would initiate an automated square search pattern that could be stopped when the object appears in the FOV of the telescope by simply pressing the STOP button.
If the equipment list in Sky Safari is populated with the scope and the eyepiece used, and if the user has turned on the appropriate FOV indicator in Sky Safari, Sky Safari could use that FOV information to adjust the size of each leg of the search pattern.
Thanks!
Jim
