Elbrus Or Pinpoint

Hello,

I have Gemini2. Which program is easy to use?

Good morn,
Manuel

If you’re strictly going for ease of use then PinPoint is your best option…it also costs $150 where Elbrus is free but can be difficult to setup.

Thanks,
Jared

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Personally I don’t know why some have difficulty setting up Elbrus. If you use the Elbrus installer the process is simple, at least it was for me. Elbrus solves about 80% of the time for me, and when it doesn’t the local Astrometry blind solver solves in about 15sec or less. I’ve never used Pinpoint so I don’t really know, but it doesn’t seem necessary to me.

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I would echo what Joel says. I have never had trouble installing Elbrus either.

Asking which program is easy to use is a bit irrelevant. Once the programs are installed you do not actually interact with them at all. SGP runs them for you.

Andy

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I had no real trouble installing Elbrus, and I’m definitely not a techie. Setting up a local astrometry.net installation has been a good deal more challenging. For me, Elbrus works pretty well as long as my alignment isn’t too far out of date.

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I’ve been very happy with Pinpoint. Rarely does it fail to solve the image.
…Keith

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I had a long struggle with Elbrus, going back to well before SGP existed. The SGP Elbrus installer certainly makes installing Elbrus painless compared to how it was in earlier days.

But I recently abandoned Elbrus. Hard to quantify my success rate with it but it was very low. I can’t say why. It works for other people but seemingly not for me. But I got tired of waiting for the almost inevitable “fail” message. Waiting for it to fail, before SGP invoked the failover was just a waste of time for me.

I still find the local astrometry.net installation procedure intimidating, but just so very worth it. My success rate with it must be very close to 100% although it will fail with NB exposures that are too short.

I tried Pinpoint. After using astrometry.net locally though, I just see no value in laying out the $$ for Pinpoint.

Terry

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I really like Pinpoint. I already owned it before purchasing SGP, but I still tried out Elbrus anyhow. It didn’t solve as fast and it failed more frequently. The local blind solver server is brilliant. Together with Pinpoint (or Elbrus if you don’t want the cost) it’s a really good solution.

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I have had the same experience as Terry. I got Elbrus to work but it failed a lot and then it would flip over to my local install of astrometry.net. Since astrometry.net works all the time and is fairly fast, I see no reason to play around with either Elbrus or Pinpoint.

Tim