Problems with plate solving

[jeruss]

Greetings: I have recently been having some problems with sharpcap platesolving. I am using cpwi as planetarium software and I have the platesolving software set to synch and center object in frame. I select an object in cpwi and tell the mount to go to it and then select the plate solve button in sharcap. However sometimes after it plate solves instead of centering the object I will get the following message: "could not synch mount to plate solve location, object reference not set to an instance of an object". The only thing I can think of that I am doing differently is that I have downloaded and installed the latest version of cpwi. Any ideas about what could be causing this problem? Thanks.

[admin]

Hi,

If you are seeing that sort of error then you are probably also being prompted to send the error report - if you can get that error report to me then I can work out if there is something going wrong inside CPWI (quite possible - it has a number of issues) or if it is something wrong in SharpCap.

If you cannot send the error report, then you can post the SharpCap log from one of the sessions where you had the problem - if you open the log file in Windows Notepad then you will find that the 'object reference not set to...' error will be in the file somewhere. See this part of the documentation for info on how to locate previous log file : https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.0/#Show%20Log

cheers,

Robin

[jeruss]

thanks for the reply Robin. I will try to figure out how to do this.

[jeruss]

Robin,I am attaching the log file...hopefully. The error message is in it. Hope you can figure something out. Thanks so much for the help you provide to your users.

[admin]

Hi,

OK, thanks, that's useful.

I can see that the error is coming from CPWI when SharpCap is telling it to connect to the mount. I think you need to find an older version of CPWI to install, because this has jogged my memory that there is an active thread on cloudy nights discussing that the latest CPWI is buggy - see https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/8085 ... -no-worky/

cheers,

Robin

[jeruss]

Thanks Robin. Fortunately I still have the older version in my download folder.

[TheAstrophotographer]

Robin,

As we have discussed in the past CPWI can not accept sync'ing from platesolving from SharpCap Pro. I mentioned this to the folks in Celestron and when they would update their CPWI driver to allow for this functionality. Here is what they indicated:

"Unfortunately I do not have visibility into whether syncing support like that will be added in the future. That type of integration would fall under software development for SharpCap and ASCOM rather than Celestron hardware. You may want to check with the SharpCap developer directly, since they maintain the software and its ASCOM integration."

From my perspective this is not a Celestron hardware issue but a driver issue since Celeston Unified Driver 6.1.7350 allows for the functionality; however, I did indicate that would check with you on this. As such, although I do feel stupid asking, do you have any information on any updates to SharpCap Pro 4.1 which would allow for CPWI to accept platesolving with sync'ing?

Thanks,

Edmund

[admin]

Hi Edmund,

no, from my point of view the missing/not working sync functionality is definitely something that is in CPWI that needs to be fixed by Celestron, so there is nothing I can really do about their issue. My 'proof' for this is that the functionality works with pretty much every other ASCOM driver with the current version of SharpCap, meaning that CPWI is the odd-one-out.

cheers,

Robin