RA/DEC missing from AstroPlanner imported Target

Hello - hopefully someone can help me out on this. I’m toying with importing targets from AstroPlanner (my primary planning/session catalog app), and while I can import target name and ID (i.e “Whirlpool Galaxy” and “M51”), the RA and DEC values in the XML document do not seem to populate the corresponding Location fields in the Target Settings dialog. I’ve tried a few different formats (beginning with that shown in the RA/DEC fields), but no luck so far. Has anyone had success in getting this to display?

thanks,
John

SGP 2.3.11.2461

John,

Not sure. My copy of astroplanner does output that data, but I am no
astroplanner expert. You might want to reach out to the author of
AstroPlanner to figure out why that data is not in your exports.

Ken

Ken - thanks for the response. AstroPlanner actually puts the data into the XML file (see below), the problem is that while the target name and ID is accepted by SGP, the RA/DEC values don’t seem to carry over (I am assuming they should show up in the Target Settings/Location fields - I could be wrong about that…).

-<“object>
<“name>Whirlpool Galaxy, Question Mark Galaxy,UGC8493,NGC5194<”/name>
<“id>M 51<”/id>
<“ra>13:29:52<”/ra>
<“dec>+47°11’45”<”/dec>
<“parallacticangle>10.76<”/parallacticangle>
<"/object>

thanks,
John

p.s. please ignore the " in the xml above, they were needed to get it the text to display properly and are not part of the AP XML file.

I put together a quick video of how I got my imports into SGP. Make sure
when you save the xml file to add the extension to the file name. Somehow
it saves it at .txt which SGP does not look for. I use the default formats
for everything.

Moussa

I see them showing up in the target settings/Location fields.

Moussa

Thanks Moussa - for some reason your video isn’t loading, but if you would be kind enough to confirm what I’m seeing, perhaps I’m just mistaken on how this should work. I did indeed discover the need to manually change the suffix to .xml.

This is what I see in the Target Settings dialog:

I assume that I should see the RA and DEC from the XML data populate the Location RA and DEC fields. Instead, the default zeros remain.

John

Hmmmmm, except for the “parallacticangle” string (which I removed) - does your XML look similar to mine? Thanks so much for you help on this.

John

Its possible that Astroplanner XML has changed. Can you post your AP
export as an attachment to this thread?

Sure thing!

Thankstonight3.zip (459 Bytes)

Mine looks fine. I am attaching the picture and my XMl.

Moussasgpexport.zip (229.0 KB)

Thank you Moussa (and Ken) - that was the missing piece. Once I changed the RA/DEC values to decimal, all became right.

John

The only difference seems to be the format of the RA/DEC. Yours looks like:

<root xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace">
  <object>
    <name>Pinwheel Galaxy,UGC8981,NGC5457</name>
    <id>M 101</id>
    <ra>14:03:13</ra>
    <dec>+54°21'02"</dec>
  </object>
</root>

My Objecs look like:

<root xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace">
   <object>
     <id>NGC1499</id>
     <name>California Nebula</name>
     <ra>4.053889</ra>
     <dec>36.36666</dec>
   </object>

Did not change the Default output format. So decimal seems to be the default.

Moussa

Awesome. Glad it is working out. Astroplanner has a Imaging Planner script you can download from the GUI that can give you a list of times to image based on your object list. Convenient for doing multiple targets per night.

Yeah - that’ll be a future feature request for sure. I’d love to see that populate the “Time Constraints” fields!

John

The first step is to make Astroplanner export those fields…We can
probably reach out to Paul Rodman and see if that is possible…Then
importing that into SGP should be relatively straight forward once Ken and
Jared clear their baaaaacklog :-).

Moussa

Are you using V2 or V2.1 of astroplanner as I have successfully imported a number of objects into SGP using V2.
Allan