Plate Solving Issues

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RMSQueenMary
Posts: 68
Joined: Mon Jan 15, 2018 4:58 am

Plate Solving Issues

#1

Post by RMSQueenMary »

Last night I did a starwatching session. I installed the latest SharpCap and ASCOM version (before that gave me COM port issues). I initially had no trouble plate solving. There was the near Full Moon in the sky. Then I am not able to plate solve despite setting longer exposures and increasing gain. I used ASTAP to plate solve. I wonder if the Full Moon could be a factor. When there is a Half Moon or no Moon, I have no issues. This is even when I use filters.
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admin
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Re: Plate Solving Issues

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

do make sure your Astap version is right up to date, Han has been making some improvements recently and one of them was to deal with brighter backgrounds.

If you do hit problems, be sure to 'snapshot' a few frames that are failing to solve and share them - after seeing the images we may be able to advise on how to fix or pass the images on to Han for more investigation.

cheers,

Robin
RMSQueenMary
Posts: 68
Joined: Mon Jan 15, 2018 4:58 am

Re: Plate Solving Issues

#3

Post by RMSQueenMary »

I did update ASTAP. It helps. I also should of have kept the object focused. Focusing is paramount for plate solving.
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Re: Plate Solving Issues

#4

Post by admin »

Hi,

glad it is sorted. The focus thing is interesting... When I was re-writing some star detection code for SharpCap 4.0, I wanted to make it find bigger (more out of focus) stars so that the autofocus routines would work better. It turns out that trying to find very out-of-focus stars is slow because of the amount of calculations needed to consider every possibility of size and position. In the end I had to limit the size to somewhere in the range of 50 pixels diameter - anything bigger than that was just too slow to be practical. I suspect other software suffers from the same limitations and therefore struggles out-of-focus stars that are too big.

cheers,

Robin
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