The Guidecam Software for VISIR

What is GUIDECAM?

Guidecam is a Skycat-based tool that allows to select a guide star from catalogues overlaid on the focus field of view, the VISIR field of view and of the telescope guide probe. For VISIR, the use of Guidecam is optional. The explicit selection of a guide star is recommended when having several imaging OBs for a given faint source. See the service mode rules for VISIR for more details.

Supported Platforms

As of Period 75, Guidecam is only supported for Linux RedHat 9.

Note about this release

Guidecam is shipped with the additional "Finding Chart" plug-in.

Guidecam Installation

To install Guidecam, you will need to retrieve the tarball for your operating system, unpack it, and start the Guidecam executable.

Please follow these steps:

  • Move to the directory where you want to install Guidecam.
  • Download the following tarball to the chosen directory:
  • Unpack the tarball gunzip -c guidecam[Version].tar.gz | tar xvf - This creates a directory structure that starts with: guidecam[Version]/
  • Move to the guidecam directory cd guidecam[Version]
  • Initialize the environment variables according to your shell

    tcsh users:

    source setvars.tcsh

    bash users:

    source setvars.bash
  • Start-up the software ./bin/guidecamLite

    If the Guidecam main panel appears, you have successfully installed Guidecam. You can delete the compressed TAR file.

Guidecam Users' Manual

Instrument selector

This page is specific to VISIR