When I tell AT to capture and solve It asks Nebulosity to take a 5 second image and appears to solve it but instead reports that it has failed to solve. I have been trying to get AT working with my camera and mount but I am not having much successĬdC has told the scope to goto Alcyone and I can see in the camera image that it is there. Can't quite make it to 2 minutes as I'm using an ancient Laptop for plate solving and so it generally takes 3 minutes or so - but I love the freedom it gives me. Once you get the hang of it though, it's a huge timesaver and I can be aligned and getting DSO bang on the CCD within a few minutes of firing everything up - and that's for a scope on a field tripod. See what the online service thinks is your centre RA/DEC and then look at where ASCOM thinks you are pointing, check that you aren't restricting AT to only searching to within a few degrees of the target as that's another way you can get caught out. See point 1)Ĥ) If AT won't solve and you think it is your image, try uploading to before blaming your image. If you know which setup you are using, you can move index files out of the AT folders so that it only has the ones it needs - makes solving much faster.ģ) If AT solves (it's great at this) but your scope won't sync, it means that ASCOM is likely rejecting the sync command because it thinks it is too far away from where the scope is pointing now and it will reject the sync command in a huff because it thinks you are being stupid. I've found that I only need the index sets 5 and 6 to be able to switch between f10 at 2000mm and using the 6.3 focal reducer. When I started I hadn't downloaded the correct set and my f10 wouldn't solve at all. I don't do any other start alignment before using AT.Ģ) Making sure you actually have all the required index files is, er, vital. This has caught be out at least twice with my AZ-EQ6 and it's possibly an argument for moving to EQDIR which takes the handset out of the equation. For me the main gotcha's seem to be ġ) ASCOM needs to think your mount is pointing in roughly the right direction to start with and this means setting the date / time on the mount is a key step otherwise the RA is too far off to be usable. Once you get the hang of a few details, I find AT to be indispensible. Thank you very much to Roger for starting this thread Edited Maby Gina Maybe I should add that I find AT really great at plate solving and getting the scope accurately aligned on an object in previous images. I'll come back with the results I'm not using APT but Artemis Capture with an Atik camera and use the Open dialog in AT as AT doesn't seem to link to Artemis Capture automatically (but that's no problem). I thought I had tried this before but maybe not quite in the right way - I can by pretty daft at times!! So next clear hour or so of clear night sky I'll finish off my PA (with AT) and give the above a try. total time from unpark was less than two minutes. So, with the three lower right tick boxes selected I hit Capture and solve, AT calls APT to fire off a 5 second image, reads it solves it, re-slews the scope to it's calculated position and triggers off a second image to check the slew and there is M33 bang in the center of the image, ready to start imaging. So how does the GoTo perform? Last night I set up on my pier and started up the software - no star alignment - and told CdC to slew to M33, the initial unaligned slew was inaccurate as youd expect - almost an hour out in RA and a couple of degrees in DEC. I initially thought that it might be due to using the handbox to perform the initial goto but the same thing happens if I power on the scope and perform the initial goto using Stellarium or Skytools. This is disappointing because Astrotortilla would seem to be an ideal solution for getting the image central on the camera chip. Has anybody got any idea why this should happen? Is it a fault of the Autostar II system or maybe an ASCOM driver problem - this would be strange because the mount works well with Skytools3 and also Stellarium? I have no problem solving images taken with BYEOS using a Canon 1100D - solving usually takes between 10 and 20 seconds but when I attempt to use Astrotortilla to slew to the accurate position it moves in the wrong direction and actually gets further away from the target - you can see this happen if you engage BYEOS during the slew process. I have very good Polar alignment and good goto accuracy using either the handbox or Skytools 3 or Stellarium using the Ascom drivers for my mount via POTH.
My setup is a an observatory mounted 12" Meade LX200 ACF with an ED 80 Piggy-backed on top. I have recently become very interested in Astrophotography and so I downloaded Astrotortilla having seen many very positive comments here regarding it.
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