Plate Solve 2 - Run Time error '6': Overflow

I have just downloaded and tried Plate Solve 2 in SGP 2.4.2.10. It will not solve any image I give it. I have tried some images of the Pelican Nebula captured via SGP. I have also tried a file downloaded from here called “plate solve image”.

I get the same error message each time: “Run-time error ‘6’: Overflow”. My camera is an Atik 383L and it is attached to a Skywatcher ED80 telescope with the 0.85 focal reducer.

Any thoughts?

Someone else reported that error recently:

Something to do with the decimal separator.

Regards
John

Well that thread dealt with issues in other regions that have been addressed. That error is most commonly issued by PM2 when completely invalid hints are passed in to it.

Can’t be of much help without logs though.

No problem. I am quite a new registered user of SGP and a brand new user of Plate Solve 2. If someone can tell me where to locate the relevant logs, I will try posting them here. Also, what is the best way of attaching log files?

Which PlateSolve2 catalog did you download? APM or UCAC3?

Sorry if I did not follow all the correct procedures first time out. I ran SGP again and tried to Plate Solve an image to get an up to date log file (and to make sure I posted the correct image). Here is the result (I hope these links work):

Logfile

Pelican Image

Strutsinaction: I downloaded both catalogues. The software seems to want to keep defaulting to UCAC3

If you install both, it will reference UCAC.

There is no way your solve can succeed. The logs indicate you passed in all “0”'s for the hints.

[03/09/2015 18:08:17] [DEBUG] [Image Plate Solve Thread] PlateSove2 Param: RA (HRS) - 0
[03/09/2015 18:08:17] [DEBUG] [Image Plate Solve Thread] PlateSove2 Param: RA (RAD) - 0
[03/09/2015 18:08:17] [DEBUG] [Image Plate Solve Thread] PlateSove2 Param: DEC (DEG) - 0
[03/09/2015 18:08:17] [DEBUG] [Image Plate Solve Thread] PlateSove2 Param: DEC (RAD) - 0
[03/09/2015 18:08:17] [DEBUG] [Image Plate Solve Thread] PlateSove2 Param: SCALE - 0

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I have tried again with another image. Interestingly, if I load this image into SGP and try to Plate Solve, I get exactly the message quoted above. However, if I access Plate Solve 2 via the “Settings” tab in the control panel, I can open the image and get a very quick (approx 6 seconds) solve.

The only differences that I can see when using the different methods is that via the control panel, the PS2 box shows 120 x90 in the “arcminutes” window, whereas when solving a loaded image the “arcminutes” window shows 0 x 0.

I thought I would try the “Control Panel” method with the image I linked to. It didn’t work - I was asked to enter a valid RA value - indeed the starting parameters windows were both empty.

Does that help at all?

There are no RA or DEC values in the FITS headers in your Pelican image so no hints can be supplied to PlateSolve2. Not sure why they are missing - they are present in my images captured with SGPro.

If SGP gathers RA/Dec from the mount and stores these same coordinates in FIT header, what mount are you using? Was SGP connected to the mount when you captured images? I wonder if you can run SGP sequence if SGP is not connected to the mount?

Peter

I think I know why. Shortly after getting SGP, I ran into some guiding problems. In an attempt to get to the bottom of these, I recall that I did not connect to my mount through SGP when shooting the Pelican. That would explain why there is no data in the RA and DEC boxes for the Pelican whereas there is for subsequent images taken.

I have now been able to get PS2 to work. I Blind Solved using Astrometry.net, and this gave me values that I could put in for Angle and for Scale. When I entered these into the boxes, PS2 did a rapid solve. Playing around with it, it seemed that I had to enter something into Scale or else PS2 would not solve (and report ‘0 x 0’ in the ‘arcminutes’ box). Leaving Scale at ‘0’ reproduced the Run-time error. Angle was less of an issue, and I seemed able to leave this at ‘0’ (in fact the image was at 169 degrees). With my set up, entering a Scale of ‘2’ seemed to work consistently. For images where I had no RA and DEC values, entering the NGC catalogue number also worked in lieu of entering actual RA and DEC.

So, assuming that I am now using PS2 correctly, my problem is solved - it was down to user error.

It might be worth doing a sanity check on the hint data, better than an obscure RTE 6 message. Ideally PS2 would do this on it’s input data but it may be more practical to do it in SGP.

Chris

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