Plate Solving is amazing

[Star101]

I took this image tonight. As soon as I saw it I was thinking....That's not going to plate sol.....and before I could finish my thoughts SGP using Planewaves Platesolve2 solved it

Impressive lol.

[Demonperformer]

You are clearly going to have to think faster to keep up!

Seriously, I agree. It is an absolute godsend. No more messing around with finders and 'tweaking' position, just let the laptop do it all.

[bottletopburly]

6 hours ago, Star101 said:

I took this image tonight. As soon as I saw it I was thinking....That's not going to plate sol.....and before I could finish my thoughts SGP using Planewaves Platesolve2 solved it

Impressive lol.

Platesolving  absolutely brilliant  I use in apt combined with goto++  wouldn’t be without it  , I don’t even use a finder anymore.

[stash_old]

10 hours ago, Star101 said:

I took this image tonight. As soon as I saw it I was thinking....That's not going to plate sol.....and before I could finish my thoughts SGP using Planewaves Platesolve2 solved it

Impressive lol.

Thats the East Midlands Easyjet to Tenerife plane  - Solved LOL 🙂     

Platesolving ignores what it considers not to be stars ! It is a good piece of software(Platesolve2) but ASPS is better,IMo, when you dont know where you are and far from where you thought you were!

[Datalord]

Platesolving is amazing when it works. The software that comes with my ASA mount is completely useless if platesolving doesn't work, so I was in a world of agony until I finally got my PA good enough. It wouldn't solve the plate if I was more than 40 arcmin off the target. 🤬

[alan potts]

I haven't got my head round Plate Solving yet, it's on my to learn list with almost everything else. I am shooting targets that can be seen clear enough with a 10 sec shot, bet it comes into its own when trying to find faint subjects.

Alan

[Demonperformer]

It really comes into its own when you are shooting the same target over several nights as it can align on the position obtained from the previous evening's shot.

[Stub Mandrel]

What's even more amazing, is I putt the URL of your image into Astrometry.net and got:

[Andyb90]

6 hours ago, stash_old said:

It is a good piece of software(Platesolve2) but ASPS is better,IMo, when you dont know where you are and far from where you thought you were!

I use SGP and setup each session. I've also found with Platesolve2 you need to be reasonably close to the target for it to work. I normally do 'Solve and Sync Blind' first using Astrometry.net local. Then center on the target with Platesolve2. I find Platesolve2 always works then and is very fast 🙂

[andrew s]

The Plate solving with The Sky X is extremely good. Provided you have enough star you can blind solve or solve using known image scale and rough location. I was experimenting with slitless spectroscopy and could even solve frames were every star was accompanied by two spectra on either side of it. 

It can be a challenge is you have very small fields 10x10 arc minutes way from the Milky Way where star are sparse but TSX had a data base addon that gives 1.1 Billion stars!

Regards Andrew