Actually, I think reliability and accuracy are important. PinPoint can be configured to use astrometry.net or ansvr to get the approximate RA/Dec if the normal PinPoint solve fails. Then Pinpoint can use the approximate RA/Dec to resolve sky position. Thus I believe that PinPoint can plate solve at least as reliably as ansvr or astrometry.net. (However, I have seen that astrometry.net has been going down a lot lately.)
One reason for using PinPoint over another solver might be that it takes into account optical distortion and can provide a more accurate result. Maybe that doesn’t matter so much if you just want to center your telescope, but it might if you are doing telescope modeling or real astrometry work it might (e.g logging brightness of variable stars. novae, asteroids, etc.).
Francesco - personally, I would say no, it does not justify. I use SGP’s focus system with both a range of refractors and an RCT. It works reliably 95% of the time. I have PinPoint already, so I use it in SGP for plate solving and, as I mentioned earlier, I have no reason to change, other than to be curious. I do not use FWHM - again, HFR seems to be fine and I’m following the old English saying, “if it a’int broke, don’t fix it!”
happy holidays
OK, I’m one of those guys who have issues with Tak FSQ and focussing in SGP and I would like to know if PP can help.
So I have one Tak FSQ that gives perfect V’s but 2 other FSQ’s do have the W problem and so I cannot reliable focus with them in SGP, I tried everything except PP (I have an old license bit lost the installer so I need to upgrade, but before doing so I would like to know if PP is a better solution)
I use a Nikon D810A, I tried binning, not binning small step count to hughe step count crop 30% etc … the dreaded W is always there … I have a suspicion why, those two Taks have a “brighter” part in the star when focusing that changes … so SGP gets confused and the values jump all over the place, resulting in the dreaded W
I suspect more people have this problem without really realising the other day I had a fellow refractor imager claiming perfect focus with SGP, but upon inspection his small stars had holes in them …
So the question is to PP or not for focusing and does that help?
Yves - I wonder if there is a way to try it out with a bunch of images. When Ken and Jared last looked at focus robustness, they asked for focus packs - so I’m assuming there is a way to take a bunch of images at different focus positions and run it through some form of simulator… I’ll take a look at PP and see if there is a simple way for it to provide a readout. If there is I could run some through.
@Yves
I just checked out visual PinPoint on a FITS file. I reports FWHM value. It can batch the files, so if you want to give me a dropbox link to a bunch of files at different focus points (which gave you the W), I can check it out with PinPoint and send you the report.
FWIW - my colleague has a shed-load of Taks and he gets the W with FocusMax. In the end he wrote his own focus algorithm. I have never seen it on my Baby Q or WO FLT132/110/98/Star80/ZS73.
Thanks, I have PP too, and I did run some of my subs through it and indeed saw the FWHM (funny that we had the exact same idea).
However I did not save any of my focus runs … and it seems it will be a while before we will get some clear nights
