Plate solving

8 members

plate solving is an advanced technique where the telescope will slew to exactly where it previously was to line up with the stars in a shot perfectly, so as to continue a shot or start again a new night, etc.

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Charles Dunlop

Anyone use this? Jeff was telling me about it. I'm going to try and make a system capable of this.

Mar 15, 2011
Marc Basti

Just compatible w/Maxim?

Mar 15, 2011
Charles Dunlop

yeah, I use Maxim. there is observatory control software that works with Maxim that controls this. But I wonder if Maxim has something that does this as well.

Mar 15, 2011
Marc Basti

I thought I read some guys were using w/SkyX (?) Jeff will know-good to have a resident engineer around. Marc

Mar 15, 2011
Jeff McFarlin

Also - to contribute to the discussion, you can run your own software, distributed by astrometry.net. I built it yesterday under Fedora 11, and it works flawlessly. You can solve anything, and you don't need to tell it anything about the input. It uses the USNO-B index, you can download the parts of it you need. Very cool software. See my blog for my install notes: http://www.silvren.com/blog/

Jeff

Mar 16, 2011
Charles Dunlop

plates solving in SkyX pro is pretty easy, super straightforward once you have your FOV accurate.

May 16, 2011
Charles Dunlop

yeah you still need either the sky or Pinpoint to use polarmax. The plate solving was a tirp, it just started up and did it on it's own, was not expecting it to be that easy.

May 16, 2011