Assistance with centering object from previous night's session

Greetings, everyone. New here, first post.

I bought SGP a couple of months back and have been having a good time with it so far. I’m trying to understand a feature, from what I understand, centers my mount (CGEM) on a specific area of an object based on a previous image. I could use some assitance on how to use this feature. When I open a image, I do see an option (when right clicking on the image) that states “Center Here”, but it is grayed out despite my mount being connected through StarryNight and SGP.

Any assitanced would be much appreciated. This would be quite handy as I do multi-night sessions.

Andy made a very nice post about this a couple days ago. If you don’t want to use the MFW, you just open a previous sub using the solver controls on the right side of the target settings to achieve the same effect. The name of the game is to get data into the target location however you best see fit:

Ok it appears that the MFW is an additional feature that I would need to buy, which I may do some time later.

You mentioned the solver control. I was able to click on Settings next to the target list. From there, I loaded a sub from the previous night and dropped in the RA/Dec coordinates as well as a figure for the scale. It successfully solved the image, but what do I do next?

http://mainsequencesoftware.com/Content/SGPHelp/AutomaticTargetCentering.html
http://mainsequencesoftware.com/Content/SGPHelp/AutoCenter.html
http://mainsequencesoftware.com/Content/SGPHelp/TargetListandSettings.html
http://mainsequencesoftware.com/Content/SGPHelp/LocationToolsPlateSolving.html

Amazing, it actually worked. It centered nearly perfectly on the frame from the previous night. Thank you!

Sure thing.

I’m having issues tonight. It seems like it isn’t plate solving the image that its taking. I try to have it plate solve the reference image (which has been the reference image for the last 2 weeks or so), and it isn’t able to solve it either. Using Astrometry.net. Really strange. Any idea what’s happening?

I’m attempting to open the Astrometry.net website but it isn’t loading. Could it be that the plate solving feature connects to the website to solve, and that if the website is down it isn’t able to solve the reference image?

Astrometry.NET may be down (we have no control over this)… one of the reasons we don’t recommend using it. Check out PlateSolve2, ANSVR (local install of Astrometry.NET) and Pinpoint.

So just to confirm, if Astrometry.net is down then SGP’s plate solve won’t work (assuming I’m using Astrometry.net within SGP)?

No, that is not a true statement. The remote version of Astrometry.NET can be used by SGPro, but we don’t recommend it for this very reason. Because of this (in the response above), I recommended several other viable (more reliable) options for plate solving. Pinpoint ($), PlateSolve2 (free), ANSVR (free), Elbrus (free). All of them work fine with SGPro and remove a factor that is beyond your control by hosting a plate solve solution on your local machine.

Specific to Astrometry.NET, again, if you want to use it, use the local install of it (ANSVR)…