Thanks very much for the encouragement. It's really appreciated. Of course, I didn't write the GPG algorithm, and most of the credit is due to it's authors, and particularly to Edgar Klenske who advised me during this process.
@ChrisRowland: Chris, sorry I didn't mention this sooner, but the RA guide rate as a function of DEC is in the 3.4.3 release. See the lines around
invent.kde.org/education/kstars/-/blob/m...calibration.cpp#L407
I used the formula you had, except added cos(DEC_at_calibration) in the numerator, which is what I believe is correct.
It would be what you said if the original calibration was done at the celestial equator (where cos(DEC) = 1.0).
I do believe it can be improved by adaptation, but that's a project for another day.
@kross: Keven, First off, please do make suggestions and send feedback. It's the only way I can debug/improve. Adding your and others' perspectives can only help, and the more testing the better. Steve (@alacant) has been really helpful breaking the system for me
and helping me find bugs, and others doing so as well will make the system better.
Re your specific requests:
Suggestion #1, Control Tab: I certainly considered placing the GPG's controls in the little control tab, but honestly, it's a very small space, and the GPG has lots of controls, and we already have this guider options pop-up with other control and calibration options. My real inclination was to remove the control tab altogether and put that functionality in the Guider options pop-up, but I was conservative and didn't. I'm tempted to do that. I think it is confusing to have two places where guider settings are made (3 really counting the controls on the guider main page as well).
Suggestion #2, Enable RA Checkbox: I have a merge request I'm about to send in (hopefully after successful testing tonight) that will have GPG honor the enable/disable RA checkbox as you suggested (thanks), along with several other fixes. However, I didn't honor the RA directional checkboxes. Those are trickier, as I'd need to integrate that into the GPG algorithm--GPG "needs to know what is being done". I could do this, but will probably not and rather just disable those checkboxes if GPG is in use, at some point. I'm guessing that if one is using GPG, one should let it do its thing.
Hy