Obsy Planning - Remote Star Alignment

[sulaco]

Evening Folks,

I'm in planning for a small obsy to be started in the spring, It will basically be a box big enough to house the 200p on an HEQ5 mounted in a pier with a roll off roof and probably with only about 25-30cm around the scope.

I presently use Teamviewer to control BYEos and PHD at the moment but I would like to make it pretty much fully remote with EQmod and Ascom, could anyone explain how I might do the 3 star alignment remotely?.

The DSLR will be constantly mounted in the focuser but occasionally the first star is way off.

Thanks

Campbell

[Zakalwe]

Try Astrotortilla. It will automatically take an image, plate-solve it and more.

http://sourceforge.net/p/astrotortilla/home/Home/

Here's an excellent tutorial for installing it too:

http://lightvortexastronomy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/tutorial-imaging-setting-up-and-using.html

[Gina]

+1 for AstroTortilla

[r3i]

+1 for AstroTortilla - one of those apps that makes you wonder why you haven't been using it sooner.

[sulaco]

That looks brilliant, i've been looking about for ages at how this might be done and never come across this. I thought that somehow a manual star selection could have been done after taking an initial frame but I think this is essentially what this does.

Thanks

[Zakalwe]

I have been playing with Sequence Generator pro over the weekend and based on this I am removing any recommendation for Astrotortilla. In it's current format I found that AT was a bit flaky. Some nights it would work perfectly , other nights it would freeze. There seemed to be no pattern to this behaviour.

SGPro is a different kettle of fish. Power it up, point the telescope anywhere in the sky and let it blind solve and sync. Or feed it an image (either off Flickr or one from a previous night) and it will blind-solve it, slew the scope to the right part of the sky, take another image, solve that and recentre and sync the scope. It watched it lining my scope up with a previous night's image and getting it within 3 pixels. It can use the free Elbrus plate-solver (and there's a one-click installer available on the SGPro website so you don't have to mess about with configuring Elbrus), or you can use PinPoint (£150). Or, what I am using, is a local Astrometry.net server. Completely blind-solving an image took about 80 seconds. If I gave it a hint by inputting the arc-seconds per pixel it then blind-solved the image in 14 seconds.

http://forum.mainsequencesoftware.com/t/local-astrometry-net-files/143

It also handled an automated filter swap and re-focus using it's auto-focus routine perfectly.

For $90 it is a heck of a program. Recommended.

http://mainsequencesoftware.com/Products/SGPro

[Gina]

That's interesting   I have heard about it before but went for the free AT which I now have working well.  It did take a lot of patience to get working properly though.  Definitely something to think about - thank you