Plate Solve and planetarium

Sequence Generator Plate Solving
1

New full SGP user and trying to get my head around plate solving. Normally I use Sky Map Pro - Astrotortilla - Maxim. I slew to the target identified in the planetarium, ask AstoTortilla to solve - and it centres the object on the chip. Easy. But as I see it there’s no way to do this with SGP - instead you have to either manually enter the RA/Dec of your desired object or upload a plate solved image, which seems a much longer more involved process. Can I check I’m not missing something here - can SGP take RA/Dec from the the telescope and solve on it? Thanks,
Rich

2

None of the components in your workflow are actually required in any way to get SGPro to center on your target (within pixels):

  • Like you said, you can enter RA and Dec manually. This is pretty cumbersome.
  • You can find somebody’s image that is centered the way you like on Astrobin, DSO-Browser or Flickr and populate RA and Dec that way
  • You can import RA and Dec from Stellarium, AstroPlanner or StarryNight 6/7
  • The best way to do this though is with the Mosaic and Framing wizard. Grab a large-ish working canvas in the area you want to capture and just draw a box around the area you want to image. This will automatically populate the RA and Dec of as many targets as you need to capture that area.

Once RA and Dec are populated, just run the sequence and your target will auto center and start imaging.

Each of those things has its own workflow. I can assure you it’s painless though. You just need to find the one that works best for you.

Certainly. You won’t ever really need to do this manually. SGPro will do this for you as a part of other workflows. If you do want to use it, just click the Solve and Sync button in the Telescope tab.

3

Also… you can provide a previous night’s image and use that for a centering reference as well.

4

Thanks, Ken,.That’s very useful.
Rich