Send plate solve results to Stellarium only?

Sequence Generator Plate Solving
1

I know most people want to go the other way, but here’s my story.

I can’t see Polaris from my back yard so I have to use more devious methods for polar alignment. I’m currently using drift alignment every time I set up, which is pretty time-consuming.

My mount has a built-in two-star iterative procedure I’d like to try, but unless I have the target star in my camera FOV I’m groping blind to find it. What I’d like to do is to take an image of wherever the scope happens to be pointing, plate solve, and send those coordinates to Stellarium to show me where I am relative to the star the mount tells me to find. Then as I use the hand controller the scope motion will show up in Stellarium and tell me if I’m heading in the right direction.

SGP Scope Centering Solve and Sync is almost what I want, except it sends sync info to the mount which messes up the alignment in process. I want the sync to go only to Stellarium.

If I take a single frame/focus shot, right-click, and Plate Solve, I get the coords I’m after. But I can’t even copy them to do a manual Stellarium goto. The dialog only allows me to set them as a reference for my target. Of course, I’d like to avoid doing the manual copy/paste altogether if I can.

I have Stellarium Scope installed and SGP plate solving running well. I can slew the scope from Stellarium, and all the connections seem okay. Can anyone suggest a way to get my SGP plate-solved coords to Stellarium? I’m a brand newbie on SGP so there may be something obvious I’m missing.

Thanks very much,
Gerrit

2

SGP doesn’t really talk to Stellarium. You can stop SGP from sending the coordinates to your mount by setting the Sync Behavior option to “None” in the telescope tab. That at least takes care of one issue.

You may be able to use POTH to disable the sync from SGP but still get those values into Stellarium. This seems maybe possible (although unlikely). You would setup SGP to send the normal sync and connect your telescope to POTH. Then connect to the POTH telescope in SGP and Stellarium. In the advanced setup for POTH you would then disable sync for your telescope. I’m not sure what would happen if POTH would emulate the sync and calculate an offset or if it would just give SGP an error when a sync happened (I’m guessing the latter).

Thanks,
Jared

3

Thanks for the thoughtful and helpful reply, Jared. I’m not sure how I’m going to do this, or if it will be worth the effort. :grin: Another approach is to only capture the image in SGP and do the plate solving and Stellarium update using an external script and interface to Astrometry.net. The general problem is to be able to use Stellarium as a finder scope with the camera, basically, and it seems like that would be best as a completely standalone app.

4

You don’t say what mount but the Celestron mounts give the polar align error in Alt Az coordinates. It’s possible to look at these and determine what direction and roughly how much to turn the adjustment knobs. I’ve done this to get a star in the FOV of a camera when polar aligning.

5

@Chris – I have an iOptron CEM60 and the manual doesn’t say that it provides clues like this. I’ll try it in the garage tonight though and see. Thanks for the tip!