Nickel POCO User's Guide

Table of Contents

Introduction
Menu & Title Bar
Target Panel
Position Display
Guider Buttons
Dome Status
Limit Status
Time Display
Start/Stop
Functions
Virtual Joystick
Manual Slew
Offset Telescope
Guider Offsets
Guider - CCD Setup
Non-Sidereal Rates
Focus Telescope
Home Telescope
Park Telescope
Manual Dome
All Limits Status
Message Log
Starlist & Starchart
Trouble-shooting
Mt. Hamilton Homepage

POCO Menu and Title Bar

The menu bar in the POCO GUI has three distinct sections: pulldown menus, title, and instrument version.

Title

The central title section should display "POCO" during normal operations. If the E-STOP button is engaged, it will instead display "Emergency Stop Engaged" with a red background. No telescope operations are possible if POCO is in an E-stop state.

Instrument Version

The right hand section displays the instrument version of the POCO software. Make sure the version matches the instrument mounted on the telescope. If it does not, contact a technician or support astronomer for assistance. Current instrument versions are:

Pulldown Menus

There are four pulldown menus: File, Functions, GUI, and Help. (NB: The Help pulldown is not yet implemented. This manual contains complete instructions for operating POCO.)

File Menu

File - System Information... brings up a window displaying the current configuration parameters for the POCO software.

File - Exit allows one to quit the POCO GUI.

Function Menu

The Functions menu has many options for interacting with the telescope. To get information on a particular function, either click on its name in the image at left or in the table of contents.

The functions are grouped into three sections depending on usage. The top section contains functions that involve pointing the telescope or tracking a star (e.g. offseting the telescope or tracing at non-sidereal rates).

The middle section has functions dealing with other telescope hardware (e.g. secondary mirror motion for focusing and dome positioning) and status.

The bottom section concerns the auxiliary program Coords for reading starlist files and generating starcharts.

GUI Menu

Most observers will never need the options included in this menu, but they are documented here for completeness and in the unlikely case that they are needed for trouble-shooting or engineering tests.

Under POCO's hood, coordinates have different values at different levels of the program. These may be displayed by the user through the GUI Display Options.

The center panel of POCO's Main Window always displays the RA, Dec, and HA to which the telescope is currently pointed. When the pointing status panel at upper left is green and reads On Target (i.e., telescope has reached the requested coordinates and has not been offset from that position), the RA and Dec will match the RA and Dec entered the last time "Move to Target" was pushed, i.e., the current target position.
The encoder position shows the raw encoder values for HA and Declination.

sa@ucolick.org
Last modified: Tue May 19 15:22:16 PDT 2009