New free Online Mosiac/Sequence planner

[nightster]

Hello All,

TLDR= https://mosaic.darkdragons.space

Backstory: with a fellow club member and friend, we built a roll off roof obsy at a dark site in May ‘21 named Dark Dragons Observatory. After imaging partner convinced me to try Kstars/Ekos I was hooked except for framing my sequences. Coming from SGP their planner was intuitive, accurate and fun to use, but its seemingly proprietary. He agreed that the Kstars planner isn't as good. He is a contributor to that project. After brainstorming cool features he had an idea. Couple weeks later he sent me a link and I was just giddy over it. So let me present:

The Dark Dragons Mosaic Planner

A wholly online service that will output easy to solve, synthetic star fields, produced from data you enter that should be usable by any plate solving system that accepts .fits files. This is generally how it works. You enter in your specific hardware info, sensor size, pixel size, focal length. I believe it will save these in its database for future use. You can then enter a target by name, number or use an Ra and Dec to show that area of space into the planning area. Specify your desired number of panels and their matrix orientation, 2x1,1x2 etc… Also adjust the overlap you’d like for those panels. This is also for Non-Mosaic planning. Find your target, select 1x1 for a single framed image. Now just move the rotation slider to get that galaxy to fit corner to corner just the way you like it! 
Now heres the fun part, select either View Image or Download Image and the software creates a synthetic star field that is solvable by any plate solver.  If you use a standalone like Astrotortilla, one of my favs, you can select solve file and sync, this will put your scope on that target without more complicated all in one sequencing programs. How many of us have had the plate solver fail for unknown reasons and your in the cold and dark losing Lights time because your not ON TARGET. Fallback to ATortilla, or ASTAP,  solve the synthetic field, get on target and back to work. Please let us know what you think and if it works for you. Our short sample size of 2 scopes and only 4 images so far isn’t really enough to call it a beta test. And if you come up with any ideas how else it my be useful let us know. 

-Jeff 

Edited September 15, 2021 by nightster