I had an EQ6 with EQMOD ASCOM drive and plate solving was working perfectly. Today I did the first light on my new mount, on the hardware tab the only change was selecting the new iOptron ASCOM driver for the mount.
When I try to plate solve using PlateSolve 2.29 I see it solving the image with “Plate Match Found” and when sending the solve data back to SGP an error message appears “Failed to plate solve: Failed to parse DEC from APM file”, this dialog box is from SGP itself.
The value returned for DEC was -.24353366 which is in radians. That is about -18 minutes which should be valid for DEC. @Jared or @Ken needs to look at this.
I’ve looked at the APM file and even ran it through our parser and it parses fine. As for radians/degrees I’d have to look into that again but it is reading the value and seems to be successful. So I’m not entirely sure why this error is happening. It is coming from SGP.
Unfortunately I don’t have a great answer at the moment. Was this a one time thing or is this constantly happening with different objects?
At that specific night I only tried clicking on “Solve and Sync” from the “Scope Centering” panel. It failed every time using different zones of the sky. I have now loaded the same FITS file into SGP, blind solve it with Astrometry.net to get the angle and scale, and then solve it again offline using PlateSolve and SGP accepted the data. This is the new .apm file:
BTW, SGP reported confidence level was 397… is that normal ? I really thought it was 0-100 scale.
PS: This solve was done from a different menu entry, right click on the image and choose “Plate Solve”. I don’t know if in SGP there are different entry points/parsers for the .apm data file.
I never saw this error before and the main change concerning the SGP profile was switching the mount ASCOM driver from EQMOD to iOptron.
