Blind solving with ASTAP

[han59]

FYI, the latest ASTAP versions (0.9.128) can do blind solving.

Below  a comparison of the solving time by Platesolve2 and ASTAP  of a 10 seconds monochrome exposure (2328x1760) containing about 200 stars:

Offset_____PlateSolve2____ASTAP 0.9.127
0°__________1.5 sec___________1.4 sec
2°________ 15 sec_____________1.5 sec
5°________122 sec_____________2 sec
10°_______535 sec_____________4 sec
30°__________________________18 sec
60°__________________________97 sec 

For this performance the search spiral was adapted to the sky sphere. Secondly the depth of the star database reading is adapted to match the number of stars in the image.

 ASTAP can be used as a Platesolve2 substitute. See instructions at: http://www.hnsky.org/astap.htm#platesolve2 Prior to this you can try the solving capabilities in the viewer

Request are made for native support in SGP and APT  but no firm confirmation up to now.

Note that ASTAP is still a ß version and feedback is appreciated. It was developed as stacking program but the astrometric solving capabilities can be accessed using the command line.

Note that the internal plate solver works best with raw unstretched and sharp images of sufficient resolution where stars can be very faint. Heavily stretched, very long exposures or photo shopped images are problematic.  It requires minimum of about 30 stars. Images containing of a few hundred stars are ideal. For star rich images the detection limit is adapted to limit the number of stars detected. This will only work for unstretched images. In the latest version also binning prior to solving is available for large images above 3000 pixels wide. This will also improve signal to noise ratio. For very problematic saturated images Astrometry.net will do a better job.

Han

http://www.hnsky.org/

 

[RolandKol]

You are legend @han59 !