Plate Solving Parameters
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'+1' posts are welcome in this area of the forums to indicate your support for a particular feature suggestion. Suggestions that get the most +1's will be seriously considered for inclusion in future versions of SharpCap.
'+1' posts are welcome in this area of the forums to indicate your support for a particular feature suggestion. Suggestions that get the most +1's will be seriously considered for inclusion in future versions of SharpCap.
Plate Solving Parameters
Hi, I would like the ability to enter focal length and pixel size (or image scale) for the plate solving feature. As far as I know sharpcap doesn't do this.
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Re: Plate Solving Parameters
That's right - SharpCap currently doesn't do anything about pixel scale in plate solving.
This is currently deliberate - adding scale ranges can make plate solving faster, but it can also make it fail if they are entered incorrectly (or the use of a different scope/camera changes the scales). To my view the risk of the latter problem outweighs the value of the speed increase - particularly for 'solve+sync' with a mount connected that is fast because it only searches a small area of sky.
Ideally I'd like features like this to 'just work' and not need any configuration - or at least as little as possible - throughout the whole of SharpCap.
So the question is - is there a use case where it's critical that blind plate solving is faster, or am I wrong in my assumption that restricting the scale range only speeds up the solving process?
cheers,
Robin
This is currently deliberate - adding scale ranges can make plate solving faster, but it can also make it fail if they are entered incorrectly (or the use of a different scope/camera changes the scales). To my view the risk of the latter problem outweighs the value of the speed increase - particularly for 'solve+sync' with a mount connected that is fast because it only searches a small area of sky.
Ideally I'd like features like this to 'just work' and not need any configuration - or at least as little as possible - throughout the whole of SharpCap.
So the question is - is there a use case where it's critical that blind plate solving is faster, or am I wrong in my assumption that restricting the scale range only speeds up the solving process?
cheers,
Robin
Re: Plate Solving Parameters
That's fair, I suppose if you want something more configurable you can just use the platesolving software itself. Just as an afterthought is sharpcap platesolving set to JNOW or J2000 epoch.
Re: Plate Solving Parameters
As a workaround, you could remove indexes that you know won't solve given your image scale/focal length. That way, Sharpcap won't search through them because they're not there. So for example, based on the LightVortex tutorial for Astrotortilla, I know my ASI294MC and my ED80T-CF camera would only use indexes 4205-4211. So I can move 4200-4204 and 4212+ from Astrotortilla's cygwin index location and put them in a backup directory should my scope or camera change.
My index files are located in C:\Cygwin\usr\share\astrometry\data\
Just google Light Vortex and Astrotortilla for the instructions. I'd post a link but that site is blocked on my work computer.
My index files are located in C:\Cygwin\usr\share\astrometry\data\
Just google Light Vortex and Astrotortilla for the instructions. I'd post a link but that site is blocked on my work computer.
Re: Plate Solving Parameters
Thanks, I'll give it a go.