Plate solving is useless!? Stopped working now, help! :'(

[Quetzalcoatl72]

I use NINA and in that program i have astap as my primary and secondary is astrometry.net. In the past i've always used astrometry because astap just refused to work. Then sudden astap started working really nice, my targets were centered, but now it's always off by quite a bit. I have to manually move the scope to the correct co-ords using stellarium, and even sometimes that's not accurate. It feels like it's to do with the degree in the sky i'm pointing too. For instance astap will go to bodes, roughly, and m101 too, but not properly centered however everything else the object just does not appear on screen. I have recently stripped my mount apart and fixed all of the physical issues i was getting like binding and chainsaw noises, now they sound smooth and i'm happy with it. But i just can't get astap to work for the life of me, Is it out of date now? Did i accidentally change any settings without knowing? I'd like to know how i can fix it, thanks!

[Phillyo]

Astap works perfectly for me within NINA so I think you may have some settings wrong.

[ONIKKINEN]

Tolerance settings changed for some reason? I have mine on 0.5 arcmin and it is always centered, but sometimes takes several tries to get there. If it takes more than 10 tries however NINA stops the platesolve-reslew sequence and just hopes its on target and shoots. If you have the retries set to a low value like 5 and you get gusts of wind or something else you could run into the retry limit. ASTAP is quite picky on starshapes, if its windy my platesolving fails with the EQM35.

[Quetzalcoatl72]

9 minutes ago, Phillyo said:

Astap works perfectly for me within NINA so I think you may have some settings wrong.

Ok it somehow worked perfectly for cats eye, it's definitely temperamental, I wasn't able to calibrate my PHD2 because it was well above the -20/+20 range so i went to spider nebula and It didn't work. My scope is 1600fl so i have to take 20 sec exposures, could it not be enough? The thing is, entering the co-ords in manually should take me there anyway, but sometimes it doesn't maybe that's a problem with stellarium?

4 minutes ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Tolerance settings changed for some reason? I have mine on 0.5 arcmin and it is always centered, but sometimes takes several tries to get there. If it takes more than 10 tries however NINA stops the platesolve-reslew sequence and just hopes its on target and shoots. If you have the retries set to a low value like 5 and you get gusts of wind or something else you could run into the retry limit. ASTAP is quite picky on starshapes, if its windy my platesolving fails with the EQM35.

I changed it from 1 to 0.5 nothing changed. It is actually a bit windy at the moment, you're right, nina doesn't retry because it thinks it's there when it's not. I just don't understand why entering the co-ords manually doesn't work when it should

[AMcD]

I am not sure whether this would apply to a NEQ6, but I had similar problems using ASTAP and PlateSolve2 with my Losmandy G11.  It turned out that the plate solvers were fighting with the pointing models created by the mount's Gemini system.  The plate solvers were adding to the model and, at a certain point, the plate solvers stopped resulting in accurate pointing.  Once I had cleared the models from the mount and adjusted the settings so that the plate solves did not contribute to making a new model the problem went away.   I now 'cold start' the mount without a pointing model each time, sync it with a plate solve and thereafter the plate solving with ASTAP and PlateSolve2 is fine.   As I say, the NEQ6 may not have this problem but your difficulties rang a bell so I thought I would throw this into the mix.

[jjosefsen]

I have an EQ6 as well and use NINA and ASTAP without problems. But I can tell you that  the slews on my EQ6 are not very accurate.

Basically it takes are couple og slew and syncs to get right on the money, but it always gets there.

 

Make sure to clear all existing points in any model created in EQMOD, and to not save new points (there is a setting for this in EQMOD), and use Dialog based interface..

[han59]

On 17/01/2022 at 15:06, jjosefsen said:

I have an EQ6 as well and use NINA and ASTAP without problems. But I can tell you that  the slews on my EQ6 are not very accurate.

Basically it takes are couple og slew and syncs to get right on the money, but it always gets there.

 

Make sure to clear all existing points in any model created in EQMOD, and to not save new points (there is a setting for this in EQMOD), and use Dialog based interface..

If the polar alignment is reasonable okay, maybe you should check for a cone error or just reduce the allowed error.  Two slews should be sufficient. but I set the allowed error to 5 arcminutes or so.