After much frustration I’ve managed to successfully plate solve using PS2. The breakthrough was realising how sensitive the scale value is to getting a successful solve. Ideally I would like to avoid entering the scale value every time I open the Plate Solve window. I have several Equipment Profiles and would like to be able to set up the relevant scale value in each of these profiles to avoid entering the correct value every time I plate solve. I can’t see anywhere in the Control Panel where this can be done so suspect it may not be possible. Does anyone know if it can be done ?
You can find the scale on the camera tab, bottom right. It is in 1x1 bin terms and SGP will scale this automatically.
Thanks
Jared
Thanks for the response Jared but I can’t get this to work for my Canon EOS. I’ve set the scale in the Camera tab and created an Equipment Profile for this camera (and also one for the same set up but with a focal reducer and hence larger scale) but whenever I right-click on an image and select ‘Plate Solve’ the scale is still set to zero and if I click ‘Solve’ I get a message saying that a scale hint must be supplied. I can enter the scale again and get a solve but I would have expected the scale to have been preset from the scale setting held in the Equipment Profile. Not sure why the scale is held in the profile if it’s not used in the plate-solve.
We do populate the scale of the image when it is available to us, but we do not use the scale in the camera tab to auto populate this field because there is not necessarily a correlation between the two.
I think it only works if you download the pictures in FITS format. JPEG’s and CR2 files don’t have this information.
Thanks Ken. I used SGPro for the first time a couple of nights ago and found that when I used ‘Solve and Sync’ it did read the scale from the Profile which meant I didn’t have to keep re-entering it. I was previously trying out plate-solving on some of my existing images. I was really impressed with SGPro first time out - especially centering on targets which was brilliant.
Right, solve and sync assumes you will be using the gear in the sequence to solve and is justified in grabbing the scale from the camera tab. Right clicking on an image cannot assume that that image corresponds to the sequence’s defined scale. That said, if we have access to it (FITS header or a FITS image taken during this session of SGPro) we will pop it in.