Plate solving for an hour? WTF

I have been trying to plate solve for about an hour now and have no idea what’s going on. at first it solved quickly and I started the sequence, but I noticed that the camera needed to be rotated after the first frame so I stopped the sequence and manually rotated the camera until it matched my reference frame, but it was slightly off in the x and y, so I decided to run plate solving again, took about 20 minutes with numerous attempts. I disconnected all my gear, parked the scope, closed SGP, opened it up connected everything and tried it all over again and it’s been about 40 minutes now.

I do not have an auto rotator, and while plate solving the first time it was successful except for rotation. how can I setup sgp to let me know where to rotate the camera to manually?

can someone please explain to me what i’m doing wrong here? as everyone knows clear skies are precious and i’m wasting time plate solving… it’s now at 1000 spiral searches and i’ve already lost an hour of imaging. thinking about giving up this hobby…

any advice would be very much so appreciated.
THANKS

UPDATE:

another hour later and it finally plate solved. lost two hours of imaging tonight… kind of sucks. would still appreciate someones insight. i’ve never had this many issues plate solving.

Hi there,

We will need more information to be able to help. Please send us logs, SGPro and OS versions and we’ll take a look.

More information here How to Submit Logs in SGPro - SGPro Support - Main Sequence Software

Support requests go in this category #sequence-generator:sgpro-support

Set search to 100-200 regions max and enable blind solve failover

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That’s what I ended up doing and it’s been working quite well!

Thank you!

Thank you! I just followed the instructions and made a post in the appropriate section.
I had another night of imaging last night, and ran into similar issues, but limited how many regions to search and had the blind plate solve take over which did a good job solving.

i’m still curious to know what’s going on with plate solving from the logs that I had sent in, and if there is anything I need to do for it to work properly.

thanks you for you help.

I have found that plate solving in SGP works extremely well if the following items are correctly done.

  1. Location and alignment - You mount must be properly aligned with the proper location input in order for it to get close enough to the target to quickly resolve.
  2. Focus - You need to be well focused for the star detection to be accurate.
  3. Camera Details - Your scale and pixel information must be accurately set in SGP so the plate solving software knows what the framing is.
  4. Profile - Make sure you create a separate profile for each variation in your imaging train such as barlow’s or reducers as this affects the scale. It is also important to make sure that the correct profile is applied to the target sequence. I make it a habit to always apply the profile I am using to the sequence before starting any session.

JG

Thanks for the information!! I double checked everything that you recommended, and everything seemed in order. I had a chance to do an imaging session tonight and had the same problem with issues plate solving. But this time I set the plate solver to search only 200 regions then move to a blind solve. The blind solve ran for a while and wasn’t able to complete the plate solve. I ran plate solve 3 times with the blind solve as well and wasn’t able to get a match. I reviewed the image and saw that it was relatively close, about 500px off roughly. I went into my plate solve settings and noticed I had it set to bin at 2x2. I figured why not set it to 1x1 just to give it a try. I then ran the plate solve again and it immediately found a match and ran through plate solving without an issue.

I’m not sure why I had my plate solver was set to bin 2x2, I think it was an initial setup that someone helped me with. I’m wondering if anyone else has noticed issues with plate solving when binned to 2x2? Would binning cause issues in plate solving? Does the fact that it worked after I set it to 1x1 mean that I solved the problem, or was it just a fluke?

Anyway, I’m glad that it worked out after I switched to 1x1, I’ll have to wait and see how my next imaging session goes to see if I encounter any delays or issues.

Thanks again for the help! I’m still amazed at this piece of software and can’t wait to setup a proper observatory to use SGP to its fullest potential.

I’ve had a few nights of imaging, and plate solving Is really fast since I switched binning to 1x1.

That’s awesome…just wish we had more clear skies.

Your list is a good one - I would also add one more, ensure the exposure is sufficient for the stars to be easily detected. Not all regions have bright stars. My plate solve exposures are usually around the 10-second mark.