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Astro tortilla and APT

geordie85

By geordie85
in Getting Started With Imaging

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John78

John78

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Thalestris24 said:

Hi

Well, astrometry.net gives a max fov of 1.95 deg but you've entered 3 deg under scale maximum! Use the 1.95 for scale max :) Search radius need only be a max of 45 deg but normally something like 10 deg should be big enough.

Louise

Thanks,  I've got it solving now on everything I throw at it from last night even out of focus rubbish... I needed to add -H and -L to do it so my custom line is now...

 

--sigma 100 --no-plots -N none -H 1.96 -L 1.94 -r --objs 100

And I've got 1.96 and 1.94 in the max and min and a downscaling of 1, its all happy days now - except for its cloudy.

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Thalestris24

Thalestris24

Posted
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1 minute ago, John78 said:

Thanks,  I've got it solving now on everything I throw at it from last night even out of focus rubbish... I needed to add -H and -L to do it so my custom line is now...

 

--sigma 100 --no-plots -N none -H 1.96 -L 1.94 -r --objs 100

And I've got 1.96 and 1.94 in the max and min and a downscaling of 1, its all happy days now - except for its cloudy.

You shouldn't need the -H and -L parameters. Also setting objs to 100 might be a bit over the top - it means it compares to the 100 brightest objects whereas 50 is usually fine. Yes, you want good focus!

Louise

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John78

John78

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24 minutes ago, brrttpaul said:

will you do mine next lol

I'm by no means an expert, but three key things are the min and max need to be right, you need the right range of corresponding files downloaded - Louise is right (of course :)) if you just re-run the install file and uncheck the AT and cgwin option you can just download extra (or the correct in my case!) FOV files.  The final one is your mount actually needs to be within the search radius of the target - if you choose 180 it takes foreeeeeeeeeeeever to solve.

May try to download my image posted earlier, setup AT the same and see if you can solve it then try your own image?

--sigma 100 --no-plots -N none -r --objs 100

One thing that's contradictory to Louise's suggesting is if I set --objs 50 it will not solve, but with --objs 100 it solves in about 8 sec, the -H and -L made no difference.

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brrttpaul

brrttpaul

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Posted

I cant seem to remember anything about corresponding files TBH, all I remember doing is downloading AT, I will have a look and see im guessing that is the problem. I think i have the min/max right (my FOV is 0.76x1.02)  so i think i need to put in 0.7 min and 1.1 max. pretty sure its these files you mention is where im going wrong

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John78

John78

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14 minutes ago, brrttpaul said:

I cant seem to remember anything about corresponding files TBH, all I remember doing is downloading AT, I will have a look and see im guessing that is the problem. I think i have the min/max right (my FOV is 0.76x1.02)  so i think i need to put in 0.7 min and 1.1 max. pretty sure its these files you mention is where im going wrong

Yeah if like me you just pressed next during the install, the defaults it downloads won't work.

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Jonk

Jonk

Posted
Posted

I've managed to get Astro Tortilla to work once over many attempts, once!

APT and planewave has never failed to work for me - every time it is within 5 or so seconds, and I've not tweaked anything in the software.

I know this doesn't help you directly, but at least you can be confident knowing it works well for others.

Good luck.

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John78

John78

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13 minutes ago, brrttpaul said:

so where do you download the correct ones?

Just double click the installer for AT again, choose your language, next, accept, next, next, then uncheck AT and cygwin and just leave the astrometric index files checked, next, then pick a range that corresponds to your FOV, next....

Before you do that though, go into the "C:\cygwin\usr\share\astrometry\data" folder and delete the .fits files in there because they're the wrong ones you downloaded first time and it'll keep searching them each solve so slow it down.

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geordie85

geordie85

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So after a bit more playing around with the ASCOM simulator loaded as oppose to my mount since its cloudy I finally managed to get an old HA sub to solve in AT. The only problem is that it took over 400 seconds. Now with my correct scale min/ max settings I'm going to steadily increase the sigma value to try and reduce the time it takes to solve.

Once I get the solve time down hopefully it'll work correctly when I have my scope/ mount connected and set up.

Thank you to all who have helped

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John78

John78

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Posted
8 hours ago, geordie85 said:

So after a bit more playing around with the ASCOM simulator loaded as oppose to my mount since its cloudy I finally managed to get an old HA sub to solve in AT. The only problem is that it took over 400 seconds. Now with my correct scale min/ max settings I'm going to steadily increase the sigma value to try and reduce the time it takes to solve.

Once I get the solve time down hopefully it'll work correctly when I have my scope/ mount connected and set up.

Thank you to all who have helped

Tips on speed are on this website...

http://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-setting-up-and-using-astrotortilla-for-plate-solving.html

Decreasing the search radius, increasing sigma, decreasing --nobjs and deleting unused .fits files in the path I posted earlier.  I found once I'd got it working it only took a couple of tweaks to go from hundreds of seconds down to < 10sec....

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geordie85

geordie85

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5 hours ago, John78 said:

Tips on speed are on this website...

http://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorial-setting-up-and-using-astrotortilla-for-plate-solving.html

Decreasing the search radius, increasing sigma, decreasing --nobjs and deleting unused .fits files in the path I posted earlier.  I found once I'd got it working it only took a couple of tweaks to go from hundreds of seconds down to < 10sec....

I managed to get my solve time down from 400+ seconds to just under a minute which is fine as a 2 star alignment then centering with a handset takes longer than that. 

Just need to test it in the field (or should I say my back garden) now and hopefully I'll get the same results. On the plus side,  the forecast is clear for the next 3 nights. 

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brrttpaul

brrttpaul

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For some reason everything froze up when i tried APT so never tried it again, and at the moment everything is working ok (eqmod etc) so dont want to risk it (tempted mind lol).  Just tried it again on simulator and after some playing around with it, it solved in just over 300secs so least im getting somewhere now

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John78

John78

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1 hour ago, brrttpaul said:

im on 13 secs now, admitidly its using images not connected up yet but im getting rather optimistic about it, Just wondering here as its just an image it just says solved but presume when its connected up i can tick slew and it will centre on it lol

Well, that's the theory, I've tried it indoors and my mount slews and pictures snap, so just waiting for dark - forecast is alright for a few nights but it's absolutely hammering it down at the minute.

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