Platesolving with a flattener

[Imme (Jon)]

Crazy things happen late at night in my ob's I tell ya!

I use APT and to platesolve I use the 'Blind' solve with what from memory is the offline version of astronomy.net. It normally works fantastically. Never skips a beat and 9/10 times it will platesolve in under 30 seconds.

Last night I installed a new field flattener (made for the scope) and an OAG (ZWO), all worked great but when I went to platesolve it struggled....badly! Timed out numerous times and was only able to platesolve around 1 out of 10 pics. Focal length is set at what the platesolved images says it should be and camera details are correct. The field is flat and stars are now round to the edges.

I thought maybe it had something to do with the flattener but thought I'd check an online option....I uploaded images to astronomy.net to test if it could solve them - solved in around 10 seconds....strange????

Decided to load up ASPS (v2.28) and try that through APT.......it solved an image in 4 seconds that my offline platesolver couldn't in 180 seconds!

Just don't get it. Not a massive issue for me as I can use ASPS but just really strange that out of the blue my blind solver has failed.

All I can think of is the field flattener has slightly modified the field which has placed stars a little off where they should be resulting in the platesolver not recognizing the field......but then the other solvers do???? Is it that the offline astronomy.net is a super accurate platesolver that doesn't allow for any variation to a field???

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

I have no answers to any of the above...

You might want to try shorter subs. If you’ve got a flatter field, it is likely finding more candidate stars and taking longer to solve

Also, install PlateSolve2 and it’s database. I find it solves much more quickly and reliably (although requires APT to be connected to your mount for position hints)

[Imme (Jon)]

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

I have no answers to any of the above...

You might want to try shorter subs. If you’ve got a flatter field, it is likely finding more candidate stars and taking longer to solve

Also, install PlateSolve2 and it’s database. I find it solves much more quickly and reliably (although requires APT to be connected to your mount for position hints)

I did install Platesolve2 and it did it in 4 seconds.

Guess I don't really have an issue as the PS2 will still platesolve for me....this post was more just an FYI thing for forum members to get their brains ticking.

[Imme (Jon)]

Solved the issue with astronomy.net solving.
I loaded the 180’ widefield index and now it’ll solve everything