RE: Focus indication

[<aah@nofs.navy.mil>]

I guess it is a philosophy question, and I should
not get deeply involved other than to add my comments
to others who may respond with answers to your questions.
  If the question is just how good was the night and how
well did the equipment run that night, then my feeling is
to use the smarts from the subsequent pipeline processing rather
than go to considerable trouble in downfits.  For instance,
displaying the postage stamp and allowing a user to cursor-around
and select stars for which you display basic statistics is
pretty simple and solves lots of problems, especially at the
beginning of nights.  Tom wants to know if clouds are around
later; Mike found for the Mark III that you can check for clouds
by looking at the background and standard deviation.
  If the question is to add real-time diagnostics for
the acquisition code so that it can (somehow) know that
a problem has occurred and (somehow) take some sort of action to
solve that problem, then the course you are currently
taking is probably as good as any.  But you really are
starting add many of the features of a real-time pipeline
processing system, and at some stage you should consider
what the end result is to be and whether a fully designed
system might get you there cleaner.
  I'm not saying to take or reject any given approach, or whether
to use QuickBasic or Linux.  I just have seen software systems evolve
and in general it is better to design towards a final goal rather
than random-walking there.
Arne