SGPro, in 4.4, added formal support for ASTAP, but did not remove support for the older ASTAP implementation that copied the PlateSolve2 communication contract in order to “fake” SGPro compatibility.
In a near future release of SGPro (you’ll have a couple months to do this) we will be officially removing the old ASTAP solver (that works only by pretending to be PlateSolve2) in favor of the “real” ASTAP solver integration.
What does this mean for you, your sequences and profiles?
For users that are using the ASTAP solver labeled ASTAP (native) there is no action required. As a note this solver will soon just be labeled ASTAP and remove the native differentiator text.
For users of the Plate Solver currently labeled ASTAP, you will need to migrate from this solver to the solver named ASTAP (native). Guidance below. If you do not migrate to the newer ASTAP implementation by the time SGPro 4.6 is released (at least a couple months from now). your ASTAP solver will be broken and, as a result, the Chain Solver will not attempt to use it when solving images.
How do I migrate from ASTAP to the ASTAP (native) solver?
Migrating is pretty straightforward and you don’t need to update ASTAP itself (BUT! an important note: if you renamed astap.exe to PlateSolve2.exe without copying astap.exe first, you will need to rename PlateSolve2.exe back to astap.exe first. Aside from this one issue, you can really just set up ASTAP (native) like it’s a new solver in SGPro. Detailed guidance on setting up ASTAP (native) is here:
Minor comment, but I spent some 1/2 - 1 hour switching from Astap to Astap (Native). Tried to re-install newest version of ASTAP, but still couldn’t get SGP to recognize the catalogues. Turns out that the newest version of ASTAP is perfectly happy to work with the legacy H18 catalogue, but not SGP. Once I had downloaded a newer catalogue SGP was happy. I suggest you mention on the new help site (very nice otherwise) that older catalogues are not supported.
@Ken I would appreciate some additional information on how to use the ASTAP (native) plate solve alternative.
I have used the “regular” ASTAP plate solving alternative in SGP for quite some time with excellent results. Following your advice I have now reinstalled the latest version of the ASTAP program as well as the latest version of the star database from the ASTAP website and pointed SGP to use it. Unfortunately it does not work for me - i.e. ASTAP (native) is unable to solve any captured picture in the SGP centering process.
I have reverted back to the “regular” ASTAP which works fine for SGP centering with, I assume, the same program and database as is used by ASTAP (native). So I would very much appreciate if you could look a bit more into this problem.
I’m happy to look into the issue, but atm I have no issues solving with native ASTAP so I am unsure what is happening. If you could provide additional information about your setup and configuration, it would be helpful. Did you make sure to restore the original astap.exe file?
It’s not an emergency or anything… we’ll make sure folks are ready to go before removing the current implementation.
In terms of differences, there aren’t really any major differences. Both solver options use ASTAP and both support the same catalogs (with the exception of H18 it seems). The newer implementation provides far deeper configuration and flexibility though.
@Ken I filed a support issue on the problem, and I can see there that you are already on the way of solving my problem, which relates to the Swedish Windows using comma as the decimal separator.