I have been observing that PlateSolve2 succeeds at first 2 to 3 attempts during centering where it tries to bring the solve error less thant 50px. While doing so when then error is in the range <180-200px it fails to solve and blind solve takes over and does it.I was hoping that if the target location is too far off then blind solver might be the solution but not when it is so close to the target.
sg_logfile_20190723204902.txt (911.0 KB)
I am not sure at this point where the problem lies.
have you some examples - target coord and image, which we can try out?
Hi Buzz,
I have been targeting M51 over the last month or so. I saw this behavior almost everyday as I start my SGP session. I first use the Celestron PlaneWave software+driver CPWI to unpack and Slew to M51 to get it closer. At this point the target is still 500-800px away from centering. I then engage SGP to slew and center on the target and it first plate solves successfully using PlateSolve2 for 2 times and I see the error less than 100-200px. Then it gets weird as it does solve successfully once in a while and most other times goes into spiral search and never finds it. Whereas Blind solve does all the time.
I took a look at my images of M51. There are not a whole lot of stars to go by in a close crop view. There are some brighter ones further out. It may just be that the closer view does not include these and PS2 cannot see them. I tend to use Pinpoint - is there a magnitude selector in PS2 you can tweak? Maybe it is unintentionally excluding dim stars?
Let me see if there is a similar adjustment available on PS2. I am using the stock configuration with only star index files added as per SGP documentation.
I think SGP overrides the FOV parameters on PS2 based on the focal length and imaging chip characteristics provided in SGP configuration.
This PS2 that comes with SGP is different from the regular PS2 from Planewave and it has some builtin tweaks only for SGP.