New to SGP - Help with Plate solving and Application freezing if solving fails

Sequence Generator Plate Solving
1

Hi,

Being a new user to SGP I have been steadily learning the application (currently on a trial copy v2.4.2.11)
My main drawn to the application is the plate solving abilities.
Having configured Elbrus and installing a local Astronomy .Net files onto my PC I have been testing the system by giving SGP images to solve.
I have to start by saying that my mount is away for repair at the moment so I have been testing on RAW images I had taken previously. I should also add that these are longish exposures anywhere between 3-10mins exposures. So they are not 5 second exposures that you may normally take, if this is a correct a statement?
I seem to get some success on some images and sometimes not. This includes using either Plate Solving (Elbrus) or Blind Solving.
The solving can take a while. Up to 5mins at times however sometimes it’s under a minute.
Despite this my main issue is if it fails to solve a plate with Elbrus it effectively stalls the application. The Watch ANSVR log reports “Field1 did not solve (index index -4213.fits, field objects 81-90” There are a similar errors previous to final log entry.
There are no errors on the application it just becomes unresponsive and I have to End task the application.

Does anyone have any tips for Plate solving? Is it because I am using long exposures images and that these contain a lot of stars and therefore it takes a long time to solve?
When solving with Elbrus I enter the Object name and I input the scale which I am using 3.05.
I calculated this by checking my FOV which is 3.62deg x 2.41deg
I also calculated my camera and OTA (WO Star 71) as 3.05arcseconds per pixel.
Not sure if this is what I should enter into the scale box?
I don’t know the angle so leave this blank. I also search on 2x2 degrees though the issue still occur with 5x5 dual angle.

Sorry for the long post but I can see great potential in the application I just need more consistency as well as resolving this freezing on the Application. My Laptop is running Windows 8.1

Please can anyone help?

2

Hi Squidward77,
We will need to see your SGP log file, especially regarding why SGP hangs. Ken or Jared will probably need to troubleshoot that part. Please see this post on how to ask for help:

A few comments:

  1. The length of exposure shouldn’t matter at all.
  2. Elbrus requires VERY accurate hints (RA/Dec, scale and angle). If the angle is unknown and you don’t enter it, Elbrus will fail immediately.
  3. Consider switching to PlateSolve2 instead of Elbrus as your primary (non-blind) solver. PS2 is included with SGP as of 2.4.2.11. You do not need to install PS2, but you do need to download the astrometric files and point PS2 to those files in order to solve. Please see this thread for more information.
  4. Ansvr (local Astrometry.net) can be a truly blind solver not requiring any hints in order to solve, however the solve will be much quicker if the hint data is accurate. I suspect part of the reason you are experiencing long solve times is because you are entering innacurate hint data (angle?) and that causes Ansvr to spend a lot of time searching, but that’s just a guess.
3

Thanks for the information.

I will try Plate Solve2 and see how this goes.

4

The only hint that ansvr uses is the image scale, but it is important that the image scale is provided, otherwise the solves will be very slow and may even fail. You set the image scale in Control Panel, Camera tab.

Andy

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