Plate Solving problem, but works in Astrotortilla

Sequence Generator Plate Solving
1

Like the subject says, plate soloving in SGP isn’t working. However, Astrotortilla works fine. Here’s what I have going on:

  1. Take a light image
  2. Asked SGPro to solve…it eventually fails.
  3. Load the same image in Astrotortilla…it DOES solve it

It’s the same local cygwin FITS library, except that SGPro connects via ANSVR. I know ANSVR is working because when I disable it, SGPro fails in less than a second. Whereas I think it’s actually trying since it takes a couple/few hundred seconds to fail. Astrometry.net (the actual website) solves it as well. I used the exact pixel scale it returned to plug into SGPro.

Any ideas?

2

I don’t think Astrotortilla and ANSVR share the same index files. Did you get the ones you need installed?

3

They both use local astrometry.net data. But Astrotortilla doesn’t need ANSVR to connect to it (I don’t think).

4

Correct… they are both just wrappers for local Astrometry.NET services. The point I was making is that I think each app might expect to find the indexes it needs in different folders within cygwin. I honestly can’t remember if that’s true though…

5

That’s right. By default both ansvr and astrotortilla will want to install their own copies of index files, so it would be reasonable to assume that some indexes that are present for astrotortilla are missing for ansvr. You can tell the ansvr index downloader to use the astrotortilla indexes: just point it to the folder where astrotortilla keeps its indexes. Click the “Folder…” button in the ansvr index downloader, then navigate to the astrotortilla index folder (I’m not sure where that is).

6

if i can put in my 2 cents, i had the same problem until i solved the FOV /pix scale just right.
then it solved in less then 5 seconds. but the indexes need to be the right ones for your scope/ccd combo.in my case its 0.4 to 0.69 for a DSLR and C8@F6.3.
of course now i dont use Astrotortilla because i switched over to plavesolve2 from Planewave.
what a difference in speed . i had to download both UCAC3 and APM from their site . put them in C:/ drive and point the way in the solver …
Mitch

7

OK. Downloaded PlateSolve2. Seems rad. (Yes, I said “rad.”) I opened a file from the PlateSolve2 dialog and it solved it in < 10 seconds total. The dialog says 2.1 x 1.6 degrees (which would be correct for my scope/sensor combo). It says the pixel size is 1.5954". However, when I do a plate solve of the same image from SGPro, it’s apparently trying 281x212 degrees!! What setting do I have wrong??

Thanks!

8

Almost certainly the “Scale” parameter found in the camera tab.