Plate Solving Issues

[paul07834]

Robin:

I tried Sharpcap 3.1.5108.0 for the first time last night primarily to see if I could plate solve with my Mallincam Xteminator2. That camera shows up as USB 2828x Device (DirectShow Cameras) in Sharpcap. Mount is EQMOD ASCOM HEQ5/6. When I hit the Plate Solve button I got the message that Sharpcap was sending the image to the plate solver then Sharpcap totally crashed without any dialog box. I restarted Sharpcap again and this time I got an "Access Denied" failure message. This morning I tried plate solving with Test Camera 1 and the Eqmod simulator mount and I got the failure message "System cannot find the specified file"

Using latest version of Windows 10 Home. I have attached two logs; one from last night (sorry, not sure if this is the crash or the access denied scenario) and the one from this am.

Hope you can find an answer.

Paul

[admin]

Hi,

I will put more logging in the next version to try to trap the cause of the problem for sure, but based on the info there is, I *think* that SharpCap is failing to work out where the temporary directory used by the plate solver is.

Sharpcap tries to run

Code: Select all

C:\Users\Paul_2\AppData\Local\Astrometry\bin\cygpath -w /tmp

to find this information and this action seems to be the only sensible failure point between the logging output I do see and the stuff that should show up later in the plate solve process if things are workign that is missing from your logs.

cheers,

Robin

[paul07834]

Thanks Robin. Is there a way to fix this problem? Perhaps reinstall Ansvr and/or ASPS?

Clear skies

Paul

[Astrogate]

Hi Robin

I am also having plate solving issues using Sharpcap latest 3.1 version and Astrotortilla installed. My mount is connected to the SKY X Pro and when I command the mount to go to an object it is clearly in the field of view but not centered. I then select the plate solve tab in Sharpcap (connect to mount via ASCOM is selected) and Sharpcap run through the plate solving routine finding plenty of stars using various exposures and I keep getting a failure due to being not within 15 degrees even though my field of view is less then 1/2 degree with the object in the field of view. Under the Sharpcap setting - plate solving it is automatically detecting the Astrotortilla file.

Any help regarding this would be appreciate!

Chris A

[admin]

@Chris,

if you capture a frame and run it through Astrotortilla manually, does it work? I suspect it may not. If your FOV is really 0.5 degrees then that's quite small for plate solving and you may need to install more Astrotortilla indices before solving will work.

@Paul,

yes, a reinstall may help, or switching between Astrotortilla and ANSVR or ASPS may help if the problem is with one of them. I have written the additional logging code which will be in the next update to SharpCap 3.1

cheers,

Robin

[paul07834]

Robin:

I made some progress tonight. It seems that when Sharpcap called the plate solver files Bitdefender thought it was a malware attack and it quarantined sharpcap.exe and all of the astrometry files. Thought it detected malware called ATC4.Detection. When I restored the files from the quarantine (and added sharpcap.exe to the whitelist) I was able to run the platesolver using test camera 1 and the Simulator mount. It did not solve, but it ran. Log file attached.

Paul

[admin]

Sounds like you are back in business

The test camera will fail to solve unless you pre-set the mount to somewhere near the co-ordinates of the orion nebula because it limits the search to within 15 degrees of the current pointing of the mount.

I can only assume that Bitdefender didn't like the fact that SharpCap was running another program in the background , which is a bit silly as lots of software does things like that but never mind...

cheers,

Robin

[Astrogate]

Hi Robin

Thank you for the helpful feedback. My FOV is even smaller at 26 x 39 arcmin and I will do as you suggested as soon as these clouds leave. I have not tried Astrotortilla on it's own but as you said it probably will not work.

Cheers,

Chris

[paul07834]

Robin, using your suggestion I was able to get the plate solver to successfully solve with the test camera and mount simulator. Next time I am able to get out for a viewing session, I will try again with my Mallincam and report back my results.

By the way my notification bar disappeared while the plate was still solving and I had to press the plate solver button again to make it re-appear. is there a trick to keeping the notification bar visible during the entire process?

Grateful thanks.

Paul

[admin]

Ah, the notification vanishes after a default of 30 seconds. I thought I had increased the timeout for the plate solving ones, but it turns out that I'd only done it for the plate solve from the tools menu (with no sync), not the one from the mount GPS button. I will fix in the next version, but for now the thing to do is just wait - the solving is still running in the background and the notification will re-appear when the plate solving engine next sends out a status message.

cheers,

Robin