Just a final follow up.
Before the clouds rolled in last night, I was able to play with APT’s plate
solvers. Both PlaneWave’s PlateSolver2 and ASPS work when invoked from APT. I
was able to use the plate solver to aim at the Horsehead Nebula. (Just in time
for it to disappear behind the roof of the house!) Switched to NGC 2903 and
found it. (But PHD2 doesn’t guide well when my scope if pointed near vertical
for some reason. Dec is oscillating for some reason. Tracked nicely when
pointed at the Orion region.) Then moved to M3. Solved the first location and
then M3 was obscured by a wave of clouds that rolled in just after 10. Gave up
and called it a night then.
Mike McDonald
mikemac@xxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 2, 2019, at 9:01 AM, Michael McDonald <mikemac@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
For some reason, ASPS doesn’t seem to like my FIT image files. If I take that
same image of M42/Orion and load it into PixInsight to write it back out as a
JPEG file, then ASPS solves the position is 10.3 seconds. Argh!
Mike McDonald
mikemac@xxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 1, 2019, at 5:40 PM, Michael McDonald <mikemac@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But in the meantime, I installed All Sky Plate Solver
(http://www.astrogb.com/astrogb/All_Sky_Plate_Solver.html) for “blind” plate
solving. I downloaded all of the indices that it says I nee for my
1500mm/3.8um imaging setup. Then I tried it to see if it could figure out
that I was pointed at Orion, using one of my L images from the other night.
It couldn’t. So I followed the Settings Assistant’s instruction to upload
the image to Astrometry.net and have it solve the location. I did that, it
succeeded.
http://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/2698663#annotated
I then entered the resulting 0.504 arctic/pixel and the Settings Assistant
calculated my focal length to be 1555. So we updated the settings with the
more accurate focal length and reran the solver. It still can’t figure it
out! Anyone have any experience with ASPS or have an idea what I’m doing
wrong? Too many stars? Too saturated? Too much gas? Idiot user?
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