Newbie here please bear with me

I am brand new to this software and I’m trying to setup plate solving. If I’ve never taken an image via SGP how can I determine the angle? Also what is the pixel size for a D810A? I believe it’s 4.88 but not 100% sure.

This site says its 4.87:

You can submit an image to Ansvr on the web and its solution will tell you your angle.

I would encourage you to download the manual and read it. It will help you.

As far as Plate solving goes you need to choose which one you will be using and then follow the instructions. Plate Solving 2 is what I use and it works great. You will need to go to the planewave website and download two files. One is a zip file and the other can just be loaded to a file. It’s about half way down the page. Don’t load the plate solve 2 software as it is already provided by SGPRO.

Once you download those files just follow the manual on how to point SGPRO to them in the plate solve category.

As far as figuring out your angle it depends on whether or not you have a mechanical rotator on your focuser. I’m assuming no. So this is how I do it.

If you use the framing and Mosaic tool you will have opportunity to rotate the image until you have it like you want it prior to saving it as a target. Once you have your target saved you can right click on the target to get what angle you should be at.

Now the fun part. Once you Plate solve and center on target just snap a photo and Plate solve it. It will give you your angle. You now have to manually rotate your camera and keep snapping images and Plate solving them until you get your angle right.

Another way to do it is to utilize SGPRO’s manual angle approach where it will actually tell you what direction to rotate and help you until it’s right.

It’s all in the manual. Read it trust me it will help you.

Sean

Hi h2opolo

I suspect it’s me but I can’t find the manual you are referring to. Can you be more specific about the web page I need to go to? I looked at the planewave web page (including their downloads web page) and could find no reference to the platesolve 2 manual. Also, what are the names of the two files?

Hi,

When I started the way I discovered information about my imaging scale, rotation angle etc was to upload an image to:

http://nova.astrometry.net/

: which all being well will perform a blind solve of your image.

Best of luck

I’m sorry if you misunderstood. I’m talking about the sequence generator pro manual.

Planewave is just going to provide you with the 2 files you need to load. They are called UCAC3 and APM

Download those two files and create a folder for them. Then go in to the plate solve window and I believe you click on File and then configuration settings and the click on each of those two drop downs and point the two files to those files in that folder.

Don’t forget that one of the files is a zip file. You need to open that zip file into its folder first

Here’s the link to planewave http://planewave.com/downloads/software/

The files are in the 7th one down the list

Here is a link to the PDF file for the manual. http://mainsequencesoftware.com/content/Sequence%20Generator%20Pro.pdf

The manual also resides in the help menu of SGPRO