SharpCap Forums

Hello Robin

I just discovered that the "Annotation Windows" shows new appearance.
I am trying to find a way to do a blind plate solve when starting the night observing. I work with a Skywatcher AZ-EQ5 GT and Skywatcher 130PDS/200PDS in AltAZ mode. So "Plate Solve Whole Sky" looks as a perfect way to do this. But what does it mean when this button is greyed out, please?

By the way, it is incredible what new functonalities you put from day to day to Sharpcap! Thank you very much for all your works, ideas and your genius!

Kind regards - MunichAtNight - Ewald

Hi Ewald,

glad you like the new annotation feature.

That button will be unavailable (grey) in the case that you have a GOTO mount connected in SharpCap. In that case it is best to use the 'Nearby' button which limits the search to within 15 degrees of the current mount position and is therefore much faster.

If your mount position is really more than 15 degrees from the current point in the sky that the telescope is looking at, you can use the 'Plate Solve (Solve Only)' menu option from the Tools menu, which will perform the slower, all sky, search.

Hope this helps,

Robin

Hi Robin,

admin wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 12:41 pm If your mount position is really more than 15 degrees from the current point in the sky that the telescope is looking at, you can use the 'Plate Solve (Solve Only)' menu option from the Tools menu, which will perform the slower, all sky, search.

This was exactly my idea for blind plate solve. But it didn't work like I hoped.

I have a Skywatcher AZ-EQ5GT with Celestron Starsense and use the mount in ALlt-AZ mode, not EQ. The Starsense auto-alignment works like a charm and from this point on plate solving with shcarpcap is unbelievable fast and perfect.

But I thought it could be no problem to align from the beginning without Starsense just by blind plate solving with Sharpcap. Idea was to have one unit and one cable less at the telescope. After "booting" a Skywatcher mount, direction north and horizontally, it is possible to slew for a individual bright star without doing before any alignment. As example Sirus. The mount slew in direction Sirus and hits it more or less good.

First challenge: The newton is still out of focus and as there is no alignment the stars are lines because earth is turning. Nevertheless the ZWO EAF arrives to do somehow focus. Not perfect but good enough to do with Sharpcap plate solving.

Second challenge: As there was up to now no mount alignment, stars are still moving. Nevertheless Plate solving with Sharpcap works! Green message in Sharpcap. But there aren't any annotated objects visible, not in the view area, not nearby. I tried it several time, at different areas in the sky, no success. Sometimes I got very strange warnings in Sharpcap, like Sharpcap assumed result positive but got negative ... I was to stupid to do any screenshot so I don't want to bother you with an impossible to follow problem.

When I found by chance a "bright" star nearby and I could manually slew to it. After plate solving, Sharpcap found it in visible or nearby area, annotated it and I could sync and center to it and TATATAT stars are nearly not moving any more, because of the first sync. Next star, next sync and all moving stars problems are gone.

I thought there might be a problem within Sharpcap when plate solving by not perfect focus and moving stars, might by some software issues, too. Therefore I looked for a newer version. But up to now I didn't had a chance to redo it with the newer version.

But to be honest, as Starsense owner I don't see any big advantage to do blind plate solving with an unaligned mount. With Starsense auto alignment I need about max two minutes until I can start observing with a first object. And it needs one single command on the hand controller. From this point on it is great and works perfect doing plate solving by Sharpcap. Very smart and cool!

MunichAtNight - Ewald

For the CSV files, do they have those vertical bars, which looks like |, as separators. Can we also use commas?

Hi,

yes, the CSV files use the '|' character as separator. The problem with using a comma is that in some countries, the comma is used as a decimal separator, so I try to avoid using a comma delimiter.

cheers,

Robin

admin wrote: Wed Dec 28, 2022 2:17 pm Hi,

yes, the CSV files use the '|' character as separator. The problem with using a comma is that in some countries, the comma is used as a decimal separator, so I try to avoid using a comma delimiter.

cheers,

Robin

Thank you Robin. I will have to convert commas to vertical bars.

Hi folks,

I'm looking for a bit of community feedback here on the object catalogs that are included with SharpCap.

I have found that the list of 'common names' in the catalogs is incomplete, so that searching for an object by its common name is a hit-and-miss affair. For instance I have just added 'Horsehead Nebula' as a common name for NGC2023 and I added a dozen or so other common names last week.

However, there are over 13000 entries in the NGC/IC catalog - checking each of those individually will take forever, and anyway there seems to be no single definitive list of common names to work from.

So... If you happen to be using the annotation (or GOTO co-ordinates catalog) and find that one or more of your favourite objects is missing its common name in SharpCap's catalog, please let me know.

On another note, what other catalogs would it be good to include? I currently included Messier, Caldwell, Bright Star and NGC/IC. I probably wouldn't want to add any more than a *total* of 10,000 more objects, so individual catalogs would have to be in the hundreds or low thousands of objects (and be fairly popular objects too).

cheers,

Robin

Hello Robin,

I have some points that you can improve a little bit

- The "Object Types" list shows all the type from all the catalogs together. I have one catalog with a lot of galaxies and the list shows all the variation ...
(bar, compact), (bar, diffuse), (bar, mult), (bar, ring, diffuse), (bar, ring, mult), (bar, ring), (bar), (compact), ... Sm(bar, diffuse), SM(bar, ring, diffuse), Sm(bar, ring, mult, diffuse), .... at the end it is in the list may be 300 different types so it is useless. Note that the problem is not "only" in SharpCap ... the guy that generate the catalog add too much different information.
Please, can you change that the list of "Object Types" is refreshed with the activated catalogs.

- You can add the "HD star" catalog ... this time with the correct position (see my messages from last year).

- In the "Objects In View" or "Objects Nearby"... if I scroll the "ID" or "Type" column to change the width, the "Details" window disappear on the right side. If it is the "Name" column, the side scrolling is stopped.

- In the "Settings": it is possible to change the size of the font. Please add the capability to change the size of the cross.

- If you find somewhere an automated generation ... you can add a monthly catalog of the actual 100 (for example) visible comets.
But for showing these moving targets ... you need to program something new in SharpCap (I know that you love program new things in SharpCap )
You can add some columns in the *.csv file with the movement vector of the targets ... so that SharpCap can calculate the new position during the next weeks .. until the new version of the "Comet" catalog with the actual visible comets. Too faint (too far) comets will disappear from the list, new comets will be integrated in the list. You can maybe automated this and save the "Comets" catalog on the SharpCap download internet site.
A user interested to observe a comet can download the file before the observation session ... or you add a button on the "Deep Sky Annotations Results" that perform the download automatically from the SharpCap internet site. One additional idea ... the catalog file can be named "comets_2023-02.csv" for February and "comets_2023-03.csv" for March ... so with time the old comets catalog can be reopened in case of viewing old images in SharpCap (from the Folder Monitor Camera). The annotation can use the comet catalog corresponding to the date of the images.


Regards,
Jean-Francois

Hi Jean-Francois,

thanks for the suggestions - I am going to look into them and try to implement some. Unfortunately the HD star catalog is too big (225000 objects) to be included by default.

cheers,

Robin

I would like to mention that there are already planetariums and plate solving systems that work very well
I don't want to end up with a giant SharpCap eating resources and filling my disk with CSV files
Let SharpCap do its job, which it does very well, and look for these features in other programs, even free ones, which do it very well

Carlo