Blinker tutorial available

Folks - for those of you who have volunteered as a blinker, here's your chance to get your hands dirty

I have created a tutorial that takes you step-by-step through the process. Currently, I have settled on using Astrometrica (shareware - free for 100 days evaluation). It may not be the final solution we choose since we are currently looking at other software and we have some folks working on bespoke software.

However, this will at least give you an idea of what blinking involves.

The tutorial goes through the process step-by-step - including how to set up the software correctly. The final step is for you to send an email with positional data if you find a supernova candidate. If you send this to me using the address given, I'll let you know how successful you have been.

Give it a go and let me know how you get on.

Cheers
Dave

www.astroshack.net/SNBlink.php

Hi Dave,

Possible application problem for those of you using Windows Vista

I've installed the software and configured it as suggested in the PDF instructions. I found the following error when I tried to use the software in Vista
[code:1]Error: No Reference Star Records read. Data reduction aborted.[/code:1]

I tried everything again on my Win XP computer and everything worked fine.

Forget the above post I see that the last update to the software was in November 2005!!!

Sorry - I only tried it on WinXP.

Can I assume Astrometrica doesn;t work on Vista then? If so, apologies to Vista users :oops:

p.s. you we're bang on the money!

Was the tutorial OK?

Interesting - I'm using Vista (Ultimate) too but do not get the same error. If the problem persists then there's a possible work-around if you install Miscosoft VirtualPC and install an image of XP within VPC. You then install Astrometrica within your XP virtual PC running under Vista. I'm running Linux from within Vista using VPC and it works well.

Phil.

PS - Dave - I've emailed my results to you.

Phil - you pass with flying colours - you hit the nail...

Interesting about Vista...