Plate Solving Issue

More often than not, my plate solving fails despite the DSO has been visible on the screen while taking a rough shot. My telescope is C9.25 SCT on AVX and camera is Canon 60D unmodified. However, I must say, this is not the case all the time. For example, the other day, I tried to shoot NGC 1232. Immediately after my PA, NGC 1232 was visible on my computer screen through my camera. But when I tried for plate solving through SG Pro, it was trying on and on and on and so I had but to cancel it.

Any help to solve this issue shall be appreciated and heartily welcome.

Rajib
Digboi, Assam, India.

Which plate solver are you using in SGP? It will make a diference to anyone trying to help.

If not already using it, use PlateSolve2. It works very well and is very reliable.

Chris

Yes. It is PlateSolve2 only as already available with SG Pro. PlateSolve2 is of course a nice program. But I don’t know why does it fail sometime.

Rajib

Nothing is ever 100% but mine works 99% of the time and the times it doesn’t, the online astrometry solver picks it up. Make sure you are focused correctly and using a long enough exposure to get a good star star field above the level of noise. Your camera properties need to be correctly entered, including the orientation (rotation). I haven’t used a DSLR for quite a while so I can’t really help farther than that but the basic principles should be the same.

With my CCD, I occasionally get a starfield that PS2 just won’t solve. But the blind solver will usually get it.

Chris

1 Like

Thanks a lot for the kind information.