SharpCap Forums

I wanted to share this with you, because it's something actually innovative in the field of astrometry and it really works lightning fast.
Skyshot Solver is a project by Adam Jesionkiewicz, owner of probably the largest Polish astronomy forum Astropolis.pl - basically it's very fast (we're talking miliseconds) blind plate solver using a neural net based on chess engine. It can handle both large and small scale images and compensate for distorions. It almost sounds like it's too good to be true, but myself and a lot of other people tested it already on multitude of different images and it just works. It's so fast that it can work on a video and generate live overlay with coordinate grid, celestial objects markers and constellation lines.
Adam intends this to be open source, so anyone will be free to use his idea and eg. integrate it with their software. I would see something like that incorporated into SharpCap, just to immediately know where you are pointing your telescope in live view for example, but I'm sure there are many more possibilities.

More information and discussion can be found on dedicated thread on Astropolis (in Polish though):
https://astropolis.pl/topic/97646-najsz ... -%C5%BCywo

Adam says that soon he will also create a GitHub page for Skyshot Solver.

Online browser version is already available, you can test it yourselves:
https://skyshot.app/app

Hi

I tried the online version at https://skyshot.app/app
and I must say it’s exceptional! There are countless parameters you can adjust, you can overlay actual images, and it’s incredibly fast.
I tested it with both raw FIT files and final PNGs, and it solves everything in an instant. Truly impressive.
In some cases where ASTAP failed, this tool managed to solve it every time.
I don’t know how it does it, but it works great!
Thanks for the suggestion—it’s extremely useful.

Carlo

Hi,

a very interesting new project - looks like the plate solving is nice and fast and I like the idea of extracting stars in the browser (that can be quite a big fraction of the work, so better to work that way than to transfer large image files to the server).

Being a software developer I went and had a play and tested to see how it worked - nice and quick and accurate, but when I got down to a cut out sub-frame of about 0.25x0.15 degrees it didn't solve (SharpCap's built in plate solver did manage to solve that frame).

If there is ever a desktop installed version then I would likely add a way for SharpCap to use it as a plate solving engine (as you can already use other engines like Astap or PlateSolve3). Of course, SharpCap already has its own built in plate solving engine that can solve most images in a few seconds and will work down to a field of view of about 0.12 degrees in each direction (subject to enough stars in view and installing the 'ultra hi res' index). There are also features already in SharpCap to overlay deep sky targets based on plate solving info and to overlay RA/Dec/Alt/Az position.

cheers,

Robin