I polar aligned my mount easily during the week at home with sharpcap, 350mm fl guidescope and ASI178 guidecamera, took all of 2mins to polar align.
Travelled to my dark sky sight and with the exact same equipment sharpcap would not plate solve!!! Screen said it had detected 15 stars but would not solve. Wasted at least 30min with no solution to plate solve , I adjusted exposure and gain, checke3d focus but still no plate solve. Ended up using NINA, which had me polar aligned in 3 min.
Setting up another scope 45min later sharpcap plate solved and had me aligned in 3 min using the exact same setup that failed 30min ago! Focus not change from earlier attempt.
any thoughts welcome
Polar alignment failed to plate solve
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Re: Polar alignment failed to plate solve
Hi,
the first thing that comes to mind is to wonder whether you might have been more than 5 or 6 degrees away from the pole on your first attempt - that could put you outside the range of the SharpCap polar star database.
Anyway, the best thing to do if that happens again is to grab an image by pressing the snapshot button and then post it here - we can investigate whether the image is in the right area of the sky and whether it has any other problems that might cause issuses.
cheers,
Robin
the first thing that comes to mind is to wonder whether you might have been more than 5 or 6 degrees away from the pole on your first attempt - that could put you outside the range of the SharpCap polar star database.
Anyway, the best thing to do if that happens again is to grab an image by pressing the snapshot button and then post it here - we can investigate whether the image is in the right area of the sky and whether it has any other problems that might cause issuses.
cheers,
Robin
Re: Polar alignment failed to plate solve
Hi Robin,
Thanks for the reply, I was pretty sure I had set up the mount pretty close to the pole initially. Unfortunately in the southern hemisphere I use a compass , correct for magnetic variation and have the latitude scale on the mount pretty close. I did read in another post that sharpcap was not plate solving in evening twilight, and this may be a factor, as first attempt was just after dusk, which failed to solve. By the time I used Nina to align mount number 1 and moved onto the second mount the sky was certainly darker.
Luke
Thanks for the reply, I was pretty sure I had set up the mount pretty close to the pole initially. Unfortunately in the southern hemisphere I use a compass , correct for magnetic variation and have the latitude scale on the mount pretty close. I did read in another post that sharpcap was not plate solving in evening twilight, and this may be a factor, as first attempt was just after dusk, which failed to solve. By the time I used Nina to align mount number 1 and moved onto the second mount the sky was certainly darker.
Luke