My tutorial for installing, setting up and using AstroTortilla

[Gib007]

Read here: http://lightvortexas...-and-using.html

After using AstroTortilla myself, I have come to love it and hope more of you do as well. This tutorial covers what might seem confusing - the installation process (with appropriately selected astrometric index files), setting up AstroTortilla with optimum settings for faster plate solving and actually using it in the field. Enjoy!

[wxsatuser]

Thanks......very useful tutorial.

[NGEddie]

Thank you for this, I was having a problem with target location last night and this sounds perfect. I hadn't heard of AstroTortilla and will be playing with it tonight.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

[Gib007]

You are very welcome!

[Gina]

I love AstroTortilla and use it a lot though at times it fails to solve and I wonder why. Although I've learnt a lot about how to use it I don't doubt there's more so I will be reading your tutorial with great interest Thank you for producing it

[stargazerslivingroom]

I really like the way you have presented this...Excellent and many thanks.

Steve

[Gina]

I have now read right through the tutorial and HAVE picked up a couple of useful pieces of information

Thanks again

[Gina]

I really like the way you have presented this...Excellent and many thanks.

Steve

Yes I agree the presentation is very good and delightfully clear

[andyo]

Thanks for taking the time to post this tutorial very clear and useful

[Gib007]

Thanks for your comments. I pride myself in clarity. I'm a secondary school teacher after all (maths & physics)!

[redfox1971]

Hi Gib007,Great tutorial,one question if I may,If im using a celestron 6.3 focal reducer on my f10 scope and using my canon 1000d,is it the 6.3 focal reducer focal length I use think 1280mm and aperture 203.2 am I right in thinking this cheers.

[Gib007]

Hi Gib007,Great tutorial,one question if I may,If im using a celestron 6.3 focal reducer on my f10 scope and using my canon 1000d,is it the 6.3 focal reducer focal length I use think 1280mm and aperture 203.2 am I right in thinking this cheers.

Hey, thanks for your comment. If your telescope has an aperture of 203.2mm and the original focal ratio is f/10 but you are now using a reducer that brings it down to f6.3, indeed you are correct in that your focal length is now (203.2 x 6.3) = 1280.16mm. That will obviously give you a larger FOV so when you enter your telescope details in Sky at Night's FOV calculator, enter 203.2 for aperture and 1280.16 for focal length, leaving No Barlow selected.

[Gib007]

Hi Gib007,Great tutorial,one question if I may,If im using a celestron 6.3 focal reducer on my f10 scope and using my canon 1000d,is it the 6.3 focal reducer focal length I use think 1280mm and aperture 203.2 am I right in thinking this cheers.

You can also enter the original aperture and focal length (203.2 and 2032) but then select Other for Barlow Lens and enter 0.63, which is what your focal reducer is doing. It gives you the exact same value of focal length, 1280.16. Either way you will get the same (and correct) FOV.

[redfox1971]

Many thanks for the help.just need the stars to come out to play.

[Gib007]

Many thanks for the help.just need the stars to come out to play.

Hehe, story of our lives! I'm waiting to receive my new toys. No doubt the weather will play up on me as soon as they get here.

[SnakeyJ]

Thanks Gib007, great tutorial and looking forward to getting it all up and running - but the downloads are killing me and my imaging laptop! With the small fov on my QHY5L-II, I downloading indexes for 2.75' to 30' - 9GB and still going after 3hrs! Every time it gets to the end of 3GB of data it starts off on another 3GB.

I did get a little concerned when the estimated remaing time peaked at 8 days

Looks like I might be having a night off tonight and leave the imaging laptop at work to complete the downloads;)

[redfox1971]

Help needed once again,one for Gib007 maybe,iz confussed on whitch index files I need?. I've done the calculation bit and my widest is 59.62 arc min and narrowest 7.95 but what files do I need?.well confussed but seem to think 4203 and 4209.

[SnakeyJ]

Small FoV cameras do demand a fair amount of space for the indices - 31.5GB in my cygwin folder!

Glad I left the downloads running overnight, as it was only 13.5GB when I gave up and left the office last night.

Will go through the rest of the tutorial tonight. Cloud is forecast for the next couple of nights, so should give me something to play with.

[Gib007]

Thanks Gib007, great tutorial and looking forward to getting it all up and running - but the downloads are killing me and my imaging laptop! With the small fov on my QHY5L-II, I downloading indexes for 2.75' to 30' - 9GB and still going after 3hrs! Every time it gets to the end of 3GB of data it starts off on another 3GB.

I did get a little concerned when the estimated remaing time peaked at 8 days

Looks like I might be having a night off tonight and leave the imaging laptop at work to complete the downloads;)

Yeah, haha, unfortunately the download speeds tend to be less than impressive. I average around 300 kB/s no matter the Internet connection speed. Please note that once downloaded, you can backup the folder "cygwin" in order to prevent having to download all of these again in the future!

Help needed once again,one for Gib007 maybe,iz confussed on whitch index files I need?. I've done the calculation bit and my widest is 59.62 arc min and narrowest 7.95 but what files do I need?.well confussed but seem to think 4203 and 4209.

Technically you are correct in that you need files 4203 to 4209 as these cover your field of view entirely. However, you need not be 100% accurate about the "20% of the narrowest" so you can call 7.95 about 8 and just get 4204 instead of 4203. Index file 4203 is 2.5GB so it adds a hefty amount of download while 4204 is 1.2GB. If I were you, I would simply download files 4204 to 4209 and that is all!

Small FoV cameras do demand a fair amount of space for the indices - 31.5GB in my cygwin folder!

Glad I left the downloads running overnight, as it was only 13.5GB when I gave up and left the office last night.

Will go through the rest of the tutorial tonight. Cloud is forecast for the next couple of nights, so should give me something to play with.

Clouds are always forecast when you are due to receive new equipment or test out stuff!

[redfox1971]

Many thanks once again Gib007,can't wait to give it a go.

[Gib007]

Some updates made to the tutorial based on reader comments and contributions. From my latest post regarding this:

"The AstroTortilla tutorial has benefited from a few additions, thanking contributors and highlighting the additions themselves with bracketed [EDIT:] text. 2x2 binning for the image plate solving is now discussed. In addition, two new Custom options commands are discussed and recommended (-r and -objs). These help speed up plate solving further and assure that if failure is to occur, that it occurs much quicker, allowing you to concentrate on altering parameters such as exposure time to ensure a successful plate solve. The Search radius was also altered to 15 rather than 45 as it is extremely, extremely unlikely your telescope will be that far off target so as to need to search within 45°. Due to the nature of these changes, the overall text was altered in a few bits and screenshots were re-taken and re-uploaded to reflect the differences. "

[Steve 1962]

Great tutorial - thanks for taking the time and trouble to write it.

Just one point that had me scratching my head for a while is that I cut and pasted the -r and -objs 50 text into my Custom Setting and kept getting a "Cannot find file "50"" error. This went away when there was no space between the -r and the -objs as follows "-r-objs 50"

Thanks again

Steve

Edited September 3, 2013 by Steve 1962

[Gib007]

Great tutorial - thanks for taking the time and trouble to write it.

Just one point that had me scratching my head for a while is that I cut and pasted the -r and -objs 50 text into my Custom Setting and kept getting a "Cannot find file "50"" error. This went away when there was no space between the -r and the -objs as follows "-r-objs 50"

Thanks again

Steve

No problem - glad it was useful! I'm surprised you had that issue. I have had no trouble using -r and -objs 50 one after the other, like so:

--sigma 70 --no-plots -N none -H 4.40 -L 1.09 -r -objs 50

[SnakeyJ]

Almost, but no cigar - managed to get this installed and configured according to the tutorial, and it seems to be talking ok to the mount and my camera QHY5L-II in Neb3 with the ascom driver. However it fails very quickly on resolving typically between 1-2 secs. Looking at the info log it seems to be a problem with finding the output files, or the file format. Feels like it's 90% there, but not quite:

Info log:

2013-09-04 22:41:12,974 - astrotortilla - INFO - Connecting to camera...

2013-09-04 22:41:12,974 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 3.00 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:13,736 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 3.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:14,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 2.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:14,726 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 2.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:15,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 1.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:15,726 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 1.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:16,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 0.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:17,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Waiting for camera

2013-09-04 22:41:17,447 - astrotortilla - INFO - Reading image from camera

2013-09-04 22:41:17,447 - astrotortilla - INFO - Solving...

2013-09-04 22:41:18,438 - astrotortilla - INFO - Reading input file 1 of 2: "20"...

2013-09-04 22:41:19,040 - astrotortilla - INFO - ERROR: Image type not recognized: Could not determine file type (does the file exist?): 20

2013-09-04 22:41:19,273 - astrotortilla - INFO - ioutils.c:605:run_command_get_outputs Command failed: return value 255

2013-09-04 22:41:19,273 - astrotortilla - INFO - augment-xylist.c:585:backtick Failed to run command: /usr/lib/astrometry/bin/image2pnm.py --sanitized-fits-outfile /tmp/tmp.sanitized.58MzV8 --fix-sdss --infile 20 --uncompressed-outfile /tmp/tmp.uncompressed.6xsYqc --outfile /tmp/tmp.ppm.TFMiSu --ppm

2013-09-04 22:41:19,282 - astrotortilla - INFO - No solution in 1.8s

Config file attached if SGL allows:

AT QHY5L-IIM.txt

I am using the neb3 demo/unregistered, so appreciate that my capture files will have lines through them, which won't help the solver process - but wanted to check it worked prior to buying the license My capture laptop is running Win7 x64.

[Gib007]

Almost, but no cigar - managed to get this installed and configured according to the tutorial, and it seems to be talking ok to the mount and my camera QHY5L-II in Neb3 with the ascom driver. However it fails very quickly on resolving typically between 1-2 secs. Looking at the info log it seems to be a problem with finding the output files, or the file format. Feels like it's 90% there, but not quite:

Info log:

2013-09-04 22:41:12,974 - astrotortilla - INFO - Connecting to camera...

2013-09-04 22:41:12,974 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 3.00 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:13,736 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 3.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:14,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 2.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:14,726 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 2.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:15,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 1.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:15,726 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 1.0 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:16,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Exposing: 0.5 seconds

2013-09-04 22:41:17,226 - astrotortilla - INFO - Waiting for camera

2013-09-04 22:41:17,447 - astrotortilla - INFO - Reading image from camera

2013-09-04 22:41:17,447 - astrotortilla - INFO - Solving...

2013-09-04 22:41:18,438 - astrotortilla - INFO - Reading input file 1 of 2: "20"...

2013-09-04 22:41:19,040 - astrotortilla - INFO - ERROR: Image type not recognized: Could not determine file type (does the file exist?): 20

2013-09-04 22:41:19,273 - astrotortilla - INFO - ioutils.c:605:run_command_get_outputs Command failed: return value 255

2013-09-04 22:41:19,273 - astrotortilla - INFO - augment-xylist.c:585:backtick Failed to run command: /usr/lib/astrometry/bin/image2pnm.py --sanitized-fits-outfile /tmp/tmp.sanitized.58MzV8 --fix-sdss --infile 20 --uncompressed-outfile /tmp/tmp.uncompressed.6xsYqc --outfile /tmp/tmp.ppm.TFMiSu --ppm

2013-09-04 22:41:19,282 - astrotortilla - INFO - No solution in 1.8s

Config file attached if SGL allows:

AT QHY5L-IIM.txt

I am using the neb3 demo/unregistered, so appreciate that my capture files will have lines through them, which won't help the solver process - but wanted to check it worked prior to buying the license My capture laptop is running Win7 x64.

That is odd indeed! Could it not be a permissions issue that AstroTortilla does not have permission to access the directory where the Nebulosity output is stored? Indeed this is clearly a "cannot read/find the image to plate solve" error rather than a plate solving issue. Mind you, if it helps, I use Nebulosity 3 myself for all my imaging and can guarantee AstroTortila works perfectly with it and plate solves quickly once AstroTortilla is configured as detailed in the tutorial.