Do I need additional star catalog databases?

[BipTunia]

I just bought SharpCap pro.

Very new to all this.

Looks like I don't need additional downloads to polar align, but do I need something else (AstroTortilla?) to plate solve beyond simple polar alignment and/or to guide?

I'm a little terrified stepping into all this. I've done simple one-minute subs stacked in DSS with (toy) Star Adventurer "mount." Did visual polar align with that, and got the basics of single-axis tracker down. But it is not good for what I want, for several reasons.

I returned that and ordered a real mount (iPolar GEM28) and a ZWO ASI120MM-MINI camera, plus have a scope for that. I'm going to try using that for Polar Alignment on my RedCat, and eventually also use that cam / scope for guiding.

One thing at a time. If I can just get my mount aligned and guiding doing short subs, a minute or two, and have it more stable than the Star Adventurer, I'll be headed in the right direction and will do the next thing from there. But was wondering if I need any more databases just for polar align.

I've watched some videos on using SharpCap Pro to polar align, didn't see any, but maybe I missed something.

Any advice on this issue is welcome.

Thank you.
Michael

[admin]

Hi Michael,

yes, to do plate solving across the whole sky to get the camera/telescope pointing spot on you will need to install an additional plate solving application *and* the star database that it uses.

Recently I have been suggesting either Astap or Ansvr. Ansvr uses the same plate solving engine as Astrotortilla, but the install seems to be more reliable (wherease Astrotortilla had a broken install that seemed to finish OK, but really failed, which was confusing lots of people).

Note that if you have a wide field of view and you generally find the target you want in view already when you try to move to a target then you might not need to worry about plate solving just yet.

cheers,

Robin

[BipTunia]

thank you!