Changes to Mosaic and Framing Wizard in 3.1

Due to the limitations of SkyView (~10 deg of FoV; slow response time; up-time issues; subject to US government shutdowns), SGPro now prefers the Aladin/HiPS services. While the DSS2 catalog is still used, the MFW will now prioritize color surveys, but you can prefer grayscale in the “Other” menu of the MFW. If HiPS services are down, SGPro will fetch from SkyView.

As a bonus, Aladin/HiPS is pretty fast and can fetch very wide FoVs. The new limit for FoV is currently 100 degrees. Not sure if it will stay there… SGPro has some trouble drawing on a field that big.

Personally, I don’t like the color survey… I think it looks too busy and it interferes with my ability to quickly find the boundaries of the area I want to capture. If most people feel this way, I will make it the default and allow you to choose color canvases if you like that.

Also… I am willing to call SGPro 3.1 close to stable now. As such, I have no intention of porting this change to SGPro 3.0. If you would like immediate access to the MFW, please download and use the 3.1 beta. If, for some reason, 3.1 suffers an unforseen setback in its release, I will release it for 3.0.

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Alright… my eyes are bleeding. This change will not make it out tonight. I’m close though.

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Hi Ken,
I am curious why you are not making use of an off line catalog of images so we can download the whole package and be able to pull up the images in F&MW instantly and without an internet connection except obviously the initial download of said files.
Then you don’t have to be concerned with servers being slow, going down, changing something on their end that breaks things etc.

I don’t own a catalog we can use for distribution. I wouldn’t be opposed to it if I did… But we would have to find a way to distribute a large survey like that.

I wonder if SGP users could contribute in some way. People could convert to grey scale and in .png or .jpg format and submit their own images that someone with way too much time on their hands can sort through and pick the best examples. You could provide a template that would be used to make sure SGP could know what is what. I think with all the images most of us already have on our computers we’d have most of the sky already if we are pooling our resources. The Main Sequence Digital Sky Survey! Let’s go!

ESO Sky Survey
NASA Sky Survey
and
Stsci Sky Survey

these three ones are good and with almost full catalogs.

These are not viable. They either do not provide an API or have restrictions on FoV that make them not useful for mosaics. On top of that, SGPro is certainly not allowed to distribute these catalogs.

I installed it but I’m not having any success whatsoever to framing and mosaic wizard. Is there anything else I’m supposed to do besides install this beta and then launch it?

Ken has not posted the fixed beta yet. He said it would be this evening.

Oh dang. Time zones must be different where he is. No worries. I have another project I saved to do tonight as a plan b in case I couldn’t make a new sequence target tonight. I’ll patiently await the fix. Should I go back to the last non beta?

I did but I don’t know if it matters.

So I’m a bit out of the loop. Is the usual server down that we normally have been using for the f&m wizard?

As far as I know yes. Ken is rewriting the code to use a different source for images.

Changes discussed above are in 3.1.0.371

Thanks Ken!

Works fine for me.

Installed the update… FMW works like a charm. Thank you Ken!
Planning to try the new beta under the stars tonight. I never install betas at such an early stage as I’m operating remotely but this time I took the risk! Hope all goes well!