Platesolve wishlist feature - Backup ASTAP with ASPS when ASTAP fails

[mfs4n]

ASTAP is my preferred platesolver because it is nearly instantaneous. The downside is that it generally prefers to have a bucketload (~20) detected stars. Under some conditions - galactic pole, cirrus... - sync stars can be sparse, especially when things are automated so you don't have the luxury of adjusting integration time to get more stars or if you're already at the max integration because of system pointing drift. If I end up in that situation and am running the system manually I switch back to ASPS, which tends to be happy with as few as 6 or 7 stars.

So the wishlist item is to set up platesolve so that if platesolver1 (ASTAP) fails, the system will make a second attempt (if some box is checked) with platesolver2 (ASPS). Maybe there's a way to do this within the existing command set?


Thanks,
Mike.

[admin]

Hi Mike,

I am working on plate solving at the moment adding a built-in plate solving tool to SharpCap (see viewtopic.php?t=7122). That might help as long as you have a decent field of view as it is good at detecting faint stars and can work down to 15 to 20 stars. If I get around to also changing the plate solving setup UI (which is a bit messy right now), I will consider ideas like this.

I'd be quite wary of accepting a solution with less than about 10-12 stars being matched - with a low number of stars, the chance of a random coincidental match rises quite rapidly.

cheers,

Robin