Plate Solving Failure

[poolemarkw]

Hi Everyone,

I received the following error when trying to use the plate solving function in SharpCap:

Plate Solve Failed - only 1 stars found. Try reducing the Sigma value in Sharpcap settings. Error was: Plate Solving Failed: 1 [main] bash 11252 find_fast_cwd: WARNING: Couldn't compute FAST_CWD pointer. Please report this to the public mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com

Prior to asking SharpCap to do the platesolve, I clearly had an exposure and gain setting that was displaying numerous stars, and my Sigma value was set to 1.

Thanks for any help that you can provide!

Mark

[admin]

Hi,

This is just a guess, but where you using one of the stretch functions (like the stretch in the display histogram) to brighten up the image? That could make stars look nicely visible to you on the screen but still be too dim to be seen by the plate solving. If it's not that then one other thing people can try is to save a frame and then upload it to the online plate solver at nova.astrometry.net - if that solves it then the problem may be with SharpCap, if that fails to solve then it's likely a problem with getting enough stars in the image.

Cheers, Robin

[poolemarkw]

Thanks Robin, I'll check out both of those options!

Mark

[poolemarkw]

Hi Robin,

Sorry for taking so long to get back to this. I tried the Plate Solving feature again and it failed again, giving the same message:

"Plate Solve Failed - only 1 stars found. Maybe too few? Try reducing the "sigma" value in SharpCap settings. Error was: Plate Solving Failed: 1 [main] bash 2216 find_fast_cwd: WARNING: Couldn't compute FAST_CWD pointer. Please report this problem to the public mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com"

I then took a snapshot of the image on the screen and uploaded it to nove.astrometry.net to be Plate Solved and it was successful.

I've attached screenshots of the SharpCap window when the Plate Solve attempt failed, and when my snapshot of the star field was submitted to Astronometry.net and succeeded.

Thanks for any help that you can provide.

Mark

[admin]

Hi,

Can you share the single frame that you uploaded to astrometry.net and also the log from your failed attempt to get it to plate solve in SharpCap please? I think the actual messages telling us that there was an error in star detection because if you look closely it's actually minus one stars found, not one. Maybe the log will have more information about what has gone wrong or perhaps trying to frame myself might reveal something.

Thanks, Robin

[poolemarkw]

Hi Robin,

I've attached the log file and the snapshot that was taken. Note that my snapshot was initially taken as a .tif file but this forum wouldn't let me upload it due to file size (31 MB). I've uploaded a .jpeg version that is significantly reduced down to less than 1 MB.

I'll also add that the Plate Solving feature HAS worked in the past, but only twice in many, many attempts.

Thanks, Mark

[admin]

Hi,

This looks like it may be antivirus related – the key line in the log is this one

Code: Select all

      1 [main] python2.6 22160 child_info_fork::abort: address space needed by 'fcntl.dll' (0x1D0000) is already occupied

Which indicates that the cygwin runtime which is required to run the plate solver cannot start up properly because some of the memory it needs is already used by some other code.

This page - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/111 ... tch-commit (currently down for maintenance, but a cached version can be seen here - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ ... irefox-b-d) indicates that the particular problem is usually caused by antivirus software and can be worked around either by disabling some of the features of the software or running a command to change the address that the cygwin DLLs load at (http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.usin ... k-failures)

Hope this helps, Robin