MountMonitor can be used in combination with a Slinky Seismometer in order to see if any RA and DEC deviations are caused by environmental vibrations. The most obvious of these are earthquakes, but vibrations can also originate from traffic of nearby roads or railroads, heavy industry, coastal surf, etc. In general these sources generate microseisms that have only limited effect to the mount (i.e. less than 0.1 arc second), but all depends on the magnitude and distance of the vibration source.
So far MountMonitor has only been tested with the USB seismometer AD-converter developed by MindSets in the UK in combination with their Slinky seismometer. Using the MindSets AD-converter any coil-type seismometer can be used with MountMonitor.
MountMonitor expects seismic data at 20Hz in a simple format where the values are separated by carriage returns and linefeeds (i.e. "-216[CrLf]-376[CrLf]-351[CrLf]"). The AD-converter stores these values and supplies them as a single string each time MountMonitor starts a new sequence. Although MountMonitor assumes the default 20Hz for the creation of the data array, the actual frequency is calculated from the amount of data collected per time period and used in the Fast Fourier Transformtion> MountMonitor uses interpolation to fit the seismic data in the elapsed time of the RA and DEC sequences. Other types of seismometers can be interfaced on request.
