Populate target from current scope position - FR

Coming from the:

Stellarium, Stellarium Scope, EQMOD, Backyard EOS, Astortilla workflow to SGP, one of the biggest changes to wrap your head around is how to get on a target.

With the above, you do target selection in Stellarium, cntrl 1 to slew there, then Astrotortilla to center and boom you are ready to go.

With SGP, there doesn’t seem to be anyway to get the target position info into SGP, short of reading it off the Stellarium Screen and typing it into the target dialog.

I get that SGP is all about setting up a sequence while you’re not even connected to a scope (during the day, etc.) but I don’t understand why you can’t grab the current scope position from ASCOM and populate the target dialog with it (so you can go on to center/sync on your target in SGP with plate solving).

Forgive me if that feature is somehow there and I have missed it, but I also see other posts in FR and bout cut and paste from other Planetarium programs, which is fine, but not simply grabbing the data from ASCOM, such that you can use your planetarium program for target selection (in realtime, with no internet connection).

Am I missing something?

The way I do this is use the planetarium program to slew to the area of the object then use SGP centering followed by plate solving from within SGP to frame the target. When the platesolve completes it gives you the option to use the current coordinates as the location for the target. Click yes and the coords are set for that target.

We actually wrote specialized copy and paste code so you can copy the target locations into the copy buffer and paste them into an RA box, SGPro will auto split the RA and DEC into the different fields. If there is a copy patterns that doesn’t work, just send it over and we’ll add it.

We have thought about this in the past. While we are not entirely opposed to this (we might have even had it and removed this option at one time), we chose to allow target population only from valid plate solves instead of what be some possibly arbitrary (and dangerous) position.

Stellarium copy buffer looks like this:

Heart nebula
IC 1805 - Sh 2-190 - LBN 654 - Cr 26 - Mel 15 - Ced 7
Type: cluster associated with nebulosity (III3pn; 3, 3, 3)
Magnitude: 6.50
RA/Dec (J2000.0): 2h32m42.00s/+61°27’00.0"
Size: +1°00’00"
Distance: 0.770 kpc

Depending on what “info” you ask to be displayed on the screen. At a minimum, it would look like this:

RA/Dec (J2000.0): 2h32m42.00s/+61°27’00.0"

But most of the time people would want more info to be displayed, vs. less, so it would be best if your paste function could parse the RA/Dec (J2000.0): out of any amount of info.

Does the version you created already do that, and if so is it in the current beta or where?

It does not, but it will be easy to add… the current code expects RA and DEC to occupy their own fields… this has a shared field so it will just need to be a different kind of regular expression for proper parsing.

This has been added… available in 2.5.1.11

Could someone explain in detail how to copy and paste coordinates from Stellarium into the SGP target window. I just can’t get this to work. Thanks

In Stellarium click on the object you want. Push Cntrl+C. In SGP go into the target settings and highlight everything in the RA field and then Cntrl+V to paste. Both RA and DEC coordinates should populate from Stellarium.

Have a look at this thread.

In my experience you need to set stellarium to show the equatorial coords for j2000, and remove other extraneous info.

This is in the info tab in stellarium.

Thanks, but still unable to get this to work. I clicked on Mizar in Stellarium, then Ctrl-C, went into SGPro target, highlighted RA field and then Ctrl-V. This pasted all the Mizar details not just the co-ordinates (see first screenshot). When I clicked on OK button, a strange RA value was displayed and no Dec value (see second screenshot). Any ideas what I’m doing wrong ?

That’s strange. All I have to do is ctrl+C in Stellarium and then ctrl+V in SGP and the coordinates are pasted in without any other information. What version of SGP are you using?

Again, try having sterrarium only show equatorial coords for j2000 epoch.

Disable other info displayed in stellarium.

After control c in stellarium, click once at the left most side of the ra box in sgp, so you have keyboard focus.

Now press control v and your ra and dec coords should populate correctly.

If somebody wants to post what a copy buffer looks like for a default Stellarium install, we can try to be more tolerant of it when tearing through.

Here’s a screenshot of what I see in Stellarium. As dts350z says you need to only display the name and J2000 coordinates (under Configuration Window/Information):

Then in SGP after ctrl+V:

Thanks for helping me with this but I’m still not getting this to work. I’m using SGPro v2.6.0.14. I set Stellarium configuration to show RA/Dec only (first screenshot), selected Bode’s Nebula (second screenshot), did Ctrl-V, opened target settings and copied into RA field (third screenshot). The text string copied in correctly but didn’t populate DEC. I clicked OK button and got strange RA but no DEC (fourth screenshot).
Even if I could get this to work I’m not too keen about removing all the other info from Stellarium. It would be best if SGPro could parse all the Stellarium info and just extract the RA/DEC values (using a regular expression ?)

I think the problem I’m having may be related to the version of Stellarium I’m running (0.13.0) as I noticed that the RA/DEC readout shows 'RA/DEC (J2000) rather than 'RA/DEC (J2000.0) as in Joel’s screenshot. Maybe this threw the parser. Joel - what version of Stellarium are you using ? Could this be the reason ? If it is it would be good if the parser allowed for this minor variation.

I’m using Stellarium 0.14.2 so it would be worth it to upgrade and see if
it changes anything.

Does this copy and pasting/parsing of buffer/coordinates work for planetary programs besides Stellarium? For instance CdC? Starry Nights?

DaveNL

Hi Guys,

To add my pennies worth, I use a lesser known but very accurate planetarium program call SkyMap Pro (v11). Using the Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V worked 100% of the time. So as you will appreciate I’m well pleased :slight_smile:

Thank Joel & Ken for this facility