Plate solving improvement

[RobertoV]

Hello,
I'm Sharpcap Pro user, and I would like to submit a proposal to improve the plate solving procedure.
I have handcraft my mount motor controller, based on Arduino and I use Stellarium to connect to the mount and to drive it to the target.
So, I would like ask to Robin if it is possibe to improve a little bit the plate solving procedure, sending the RA and DEC to Stellarium, so it'll be very easy to repositioning the telescope to the correct target required, in case of positioning error.
Cheers to all and clear skies.
Roberto

[admin]

Hi Roberto,

this is something that you should be able to do without me needing to change SharpCap.

If you have an ASCOM driver for your mount controller then just connect *both* SharpCap and Stellarium to the ASCOM driver - then tell Stellarium to follow the telescope and it should move when SharpCap updates the co-ordinates. If you have trouble connecting both to the ASCOM driver at once then use the 'ASCOM Device Hub' to fix the problem - you get SharpCap and Stellarium to talk to the device hub and that talks to your ASCOM driver.

If you don't have an ASCOM driver, then you can use the ASCOM 'Simulator' mount driver for the same thing - get both SharpCap and Stellarium to talk to that and they will both agree about what the co-ordinates of the telescope are. In Stellarium you tell the telescope to 'slew' to the target, which gets the co-ordinates close to correct, then plate solve in SharpCap and it should then agree.

cheers,

Robin

[RobertoV]

Hi Robin,
I just verified what you wrote to me, obviously you were right in my case the mount control that I built myself recognizes only some commands of the LX200 protocol so I can't use Ascom, so I created two mounts in Stellarium, one controlled by Ascom and Sharpcap, the other LX200 is controlled by Stellarium, after a plate solving it's enough to synchronize the two telescopes and the game is done!
Thank you very much for your precious time,
ciao Roberto

[admin]

Hi Roberto,

that's good to hear! I must admit that I didn't know that Stellarium could support multiple mounts at once and synchronize them, but good that it can

cheers,

Robin

[RobertoV]

…I didn't know it myself but, you know, necessity is the mother of genius
ciao
Roberto