Star Hopping with on-the-fly Astrometry

[uhb1966]

OK, for everybody who missed the app (like Bob), and as long as badgers is offline, here's a link to a working binary. You must download the indexes from astrometry.net, it's well explained on that site how to do it.

Here is the binary for Mac OSX:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4z60meoouaalrge/astrometry-test.zip?dl=0

Regards, U.

[banzai]

OK, for everybody who missed the app (like Bob), and as long as badgers is offline, here's a link to a working binary. You must download the indexes from astrometry.net, it's well explained on that site how to do it.

Here is the binary for Mac OSX:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4z60meoouaalrge/astrometry-test.zip?dl=0

Regards, U.

Thanks, UHB! It's mostly working as expected. Super cool.

For anyone who doesn't want to have to manually download all the index files, first figure out which ones you need by reading this:

http://astrometry.net/doc/readme.html#getting-index-files

Then go to the download area and verify that the URLs still match what I list below.

Create your destination directory on your Mac. Open up a Terminal window and move to the new directory (e.g. cd ~/Pictures/astrometry/indexes).

Then grab each index scale all at once through the "curl" terminal command. For example, my image scale tops out at 90 arcminutes. Based on their recommendations from the page above I need the 4204 through 4211 scales. So here are my curl calls for each set. Each call will move through its specified sequence (e.g. [00-47]) and download each file into the terminal window's current directory.

curl -O http://data.astrometry.net/4200/index-4204-[00-47].fits

curl -O http://data.astrometry.net/4200/index-4205-[00-11].fits

curl -O http://data.astrometry.net/4200/index-4206-[00-11].fits

curl -O http://data.astrometry.net/4200/index-4207-[00-11].fits

And then the wider scales are just a single file:

curl -O http://data.astrometry.net/4200/index-4208.fits

curl -O http://data.astrometry.net/4200/index-4209.fits

curl -O http://data.astrometry.net/4200/index-4210.fits

curl -O http://data.astrometry.net/4200/index-4211.fits

[furrysocks2]

On 18/11/2012 at 19:00, badgers said:

Here's a version with a corner for the solved image... took an age to compute the effective RA/DEC of an arbitrary corner.

This version requires two ports setup, one for image centre and one for a corner. The corner is at pixel 0,0 in the image.

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/~aje/dist/starhop_corner.pl

Still working on the Stellarium code hacking, I'm drawing things alright, just need them to appear where I need them.

A

As far as I can work out, this was the last update for this script. Great thread!

I never tried running it, but might have a solution to "how to draw a rectangle", also doesn't rely on the "Telescope Control" plugin.

Stellarium scripting can be done through "Remote Control":

curl --data 'code=core.moveToRaDec(0.5,0.5);
                  Oculars.toggleCCD()' \
http://localhost:8090/api/scripts/direct

But the CCD overlay moves as you move, so better to have a static rectangle drawn that lets you zoom and move to see context.

core.loadSkyImage("name", "file.png", ....)

Looks like it works with transparency in pngs, so a red rectangle in a file stored in the Stellarium folder, then a script call to the Remote Control plugin to display it in the right place. Haven't got it working, but might work. 

 

 

Don't know how easy it is to determine CCD rotation - have to use AltAz perhaps, rather use RaDec. There's a center/radius/rotation version of loadSkyImage(), same problem to determine rotation applies. There's a four-corners version of loadSkyImage which seems ideal, but I haven't managed to get it working at all yet.

 

For me and a big dob on a not-yet-built equatorial platform, I'd simply like to be able to push-to and flick the tracking switch. Being able to see a rectangle on Stellarium in near-real-time, would be cool.

 

Edit: simpler yet, four "markers" like the green one seen in the screenshot above, perhaps with bottom-left a different colour. But I don't think CustomObjectMgr is exposed to the scripting interface yes it is, from version 0.15.1. Could leave a trail of center markers to show where you've been. Edit: it segfaults when I try to add a marker in this way - could someone try hitting F12, typiing "CustomObjectMgr.addCustomObject("Marker",0,0,true)" and hitting the play button...?

[furrysocks2]

OK, Markers do work so the four corners can be scripted, there's just a bug in the Stellarium code, so marker text needs at least one space in it. Ideally, there'd be a label on only one of the four corners. Or perhaps I prefer the red box. The CCD sensor overlay would be ok if it stayed at the coordinates given. Perhaps just a center marker would be enough or some applications, as I'd know my FoV. 

More than one way to skin a cat, I guess. Ideal to have option of either a center marker or a frame box in the correct orientation.

So for the very simple case, image -> platesolve -> ra/dec -> remote control marker, no need to configure a scope in Stellarium and have it connect to the starhop.pl script. Might use timestamp as the marker text.

 

[furrysocks2]

As simple as I can get it just now... not integrated with starhop.pl directory-watching feature, but just a simple script to put Stellarium in the right place, given a single input image, and draw a rectangle round the field of view:

Bash script here: solve_to_stellarium.sh

 Click to open full size frame image, then save as scripts/images/frame.png in Stellarium application folder. 

 

Running on this input image:

Gives me this view in Stellarium:

 

Yet to try it on smaller fields, live images from my camera, or anything else, but this seems like an ok way to get the field of view displaying.

Nice to rotate to same orientation, and/or mark bottom-left corner, and possibly integrate to starhop.pl, but I like this simple one-job script for now.

[furrysocks2]

On 3/30/2012 at 23:05, badgers said:

Here's an example solved image

I took this example, removed the names and footer so it was more likely to succeed running back through plate solving.

It did solve, and when I opened up my Stellarium it was already there... had to zoom out a bit, but it works.

 

[furrysocks2]

Here's a perl script that works in my ansvr cygwin console and in a Linux VM:

solve_to_stellarium.pl

 

Usage. First enable remote control plugin in Stellarium, copy the transparent-red-border image in previous post to c:\Program Files\Stellarium\scripts\images\frame.png or similar, then run:

./solve_to_stellarium.pl <image_filename> localhost:8090