I am finally getting my software and hardware working together, or at least trying. I do like one program, and that is Stellarium. When I am using BYEOS, I use it to slew to an object, and then after setting PHD2 to work, use Astrotortilla to do my plate solving.
I am wondering if I can us Stellarium to move my mount to close to my desired target, and then have my sequence generated for that target take over from that point.
It certainly would be wonderful to have a Planetarium that can interface with SGP. Caley Ann
It seems I can do quite a bit through ASCOM6.0, and the various other ASCOM drivers. I know Stellarium is somehow linked with an ASCOM driver which I believe is called Stellarium Scope.
As for the last, I have had a box pop up when installing programs that has the Word Admin in it. I’ve never really understood what this is. I just press yes to get my software installed. I am not at all good with computers or software. I have to play around with things for quite some time before I figure out how they work. Caley Ann
I use Stellarium …you must have Stellarium Scope also . Everything works great with SGP. Just don’t forget to “Sync” Stellarium to the plate solve that you get from SGP so the planetarium software agrees with SGP.
I’ve been using Stellarium/Stellarium Scope with my Celestron CGEM DX mount for a bit over a year. I like it because it gets me close to my target.
Of course, I am still struggling to get SGP and Plate Solve 2 to put my system spot on the target I want. So far I have had failures for the past week. But then, I have just started to learn SGP, and how to create the proper profiles for equipment and sequences.
But I am getting close. I just keep looking at the manual, and taking suggestions to apply towards getting things working. Maybe I will eventually get all my hardware and software working together so I can finally go remote from my house. Caley Ann
What you could do is slew to a star using Stellarium near your target DSO, “Sync” on that star with Stellarium (Ctrl-1). Then use SGP to slew to target DSO using “Slew Now”. Finally click on SGP’s “Center Now” button to plate solve and center the target.
What I do is go to Astronbin.com to find an object I am interested to image. I copy the URL address of DSO from Astrobin and paste it to SGP and the coordinates will be populated in SGP. From then on using SGP’s “Slew Now” and then “Center Now” should work. Once successful, then you can run the Sequence.
If Plate Solve 2 still does not work, then you may have to tweak some settings in Plate Solve 2 like change the max star size to 20 sigma and min star size to 8 pixels or something like that. Also make sure your image scale setting in SGP is correct and use bin 1x1 image scale.
Peter, I appreciate your help. I definitely will be using everything that people have provided to get things going.
I thought I would be doing some positive progress tonight, but it seems that I forgot a few things when creating my equipment profiles and sequence profiles. One of them was Plate Solving, and since I am still new at all of this, I ended up having to delete the three DSO sequence profiles, and will have to create everything all over tomorrow, and if possible, try again tomorrow night. As it is, somehow my alignment got off, and I will again have to do a visual alignment. My polar alignment is nearly perfect, so all I can figure is I bumped the mount somehow.
When it comes to new software, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong with me doing it. I guess it is the way I learn. Caley Ann