It doesn’t seem that plate solving using Astrometry.net adds the WCS coordinates to the image.
I want to use eXcalibrator (BF-Astro Freeware - eXcalibrator) to calibrate the RGB exposure times and this requires WCS coordinates be added to the fits header. Particularly:
There is no easy way to get the WCS info from the local astrometry.net solver to the image without having SGP do it. Technically the info is available when the solve completes, but we really need SGP to add it to the image headers.
As a workaround, if you have PixInsight, you can use its image solver (Script => Image Analysis => ImageSolver) which will add the WCS headers.
Yea, I ended up doing that. But I had to type in the ‘rough’ coordinates for each one because ImageSolver is not blind and when you’re doing mosaics they’re not close enough to type in ‘North American Nebula’.
I think most my wasted time was trying to do it automatically. The worst part was Pinpoint 6 wouldn’t do it… couldn’t find any stars in the image it said.
I found a workaround to get WCS data into images. Use the on-line astrometry.net at Astrometry.net Upload the image and when finished click on “Go to results page” Then download the “new-image.fits”
BTW, I used this data with the eXcalibrator program and it gave me rations of Red-1.000, Green-1.180, Blue-1.793 for my STT-8300M with the RGB filters from SBIG.