Sharpcap Pro <-> Astrotortilla interface

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Tblog
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Joined: Sat Nov 30, 2019 10:15 pm

Sharpcap Pro <-> Astrotortilla interface

#1

Post by Tblog »

Trying to get sharpcap to plate solve with Astrotorilla. No joy yet, but I may have not provided the correct .fit indexes. Still researching. Online solver has no problem solving the captured images i think I am passing from Sharpcap to AT
However, my troubleshooting leads to a couple of questions:
1) Do I need to configure the mount and/or camera in AT? I'm guessing not, as I think Sharpcap is passing an image to solve...
2) What image does Sharpcap pass - the most recent one taken by Sharpcap? Using whatever camera configuration I have set?
3) There seems to be a disparity between the number of stars AT sees (<50) and the online solver (100s); And AT downsizes my image by 3, online by 2.
Any insight appreciated.
Thanks.
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Re: Sharpcap Pro <-> Astrotortilla interface

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

There's no need to set up any settings in AstroTortilla, since SharpCap bypasses those and sends its own settings to the plate solving engine. There is one setting to configure in SharpCap in the plate solving configuration page, which is the 'Sigma' level. This determines how high above the background as source has to rise in order to be detected as a star. Setting this to lower values will find more stars, setting it to higher values will find less. Usually finding 50 to 200 stars is about right.

SharpCap does indeed send an image that is captured to the plate solving engine (actually, usually it waits for the next image to be captured rather than using the most recent). When you are using a high-resolution camera, SharpCap sends options to the plate solving engine to down sample by a factor of three as the engine seems to perform very poorly with very high resolution images.

Remember that if you use the plate solving button in the mount controls, SharpCap also limits the area of search to be within 15° of where the mount is currently pointing – this speeds up the procedure since less data needs to be searched, but means you won't get a result if you are using for example the test camera and a simulated mount as the image will be other part of the sky that is nowhere near where the mount says it is pointing.

Cheers, Robin
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