AstroTortilla Freeware

[2stroke]

Just found a great AstroTortilla tutorial which i can't wait to try out and get my goto's spot on with its plate-solving, anyhow heres a link if any wants to read the tutorial which is great http://lightvortexastronomy.blogspot.com.a u/2013/08/tutorial-imaging-setting-up-and-using.html beats paying for Maxpoint ect :) If anyone is already using can you post back how well it works and if there any issues ect.

[g__day]

If you are using the Sky6, regardless of which options you select it blocks syncs (mostly likely to protect any underlying Tpoint model).

http://sourceforge.net/p/astrotortilla/discussion/issues/thread/b5546e48/

Secondly Tpoint only allows slews to an incorrectly object if you can do a sync first; there is no option to re-slew to target once it has calculated the pointing offset without issuing a sync first. The authors of AT say this option is a bit complex and "may" be available next year.

Finally if you know what you imaging scale is - speed thing up by 1) always having about 20-50 bright enough stars in the imaging, 2) setting tight limits around your imaging scale - say < +/- 5% of your real scale and selecting it to search no farther than +/- 20 degrees from reported RA / DEC.

Lastly putting the image database on a SSD seems to help alot!

[RickS]

Astrotortilla works well for me. I mainly use it as a way to determine my initial scope position when I'm setting up in the field and ready to polar align with PoleAlignMax. It does require some tuning to get blind plate solves happening quickly at long focal lengths and the post by Matthew and the tutorial both cover the important parameters that need adjusting.

Cheers,
Rick.

[lazjen]

As suggested by your tutorial link, tuning the setup will help greatly.

I found that I didn't have to be precise with the scale values, so long as the range covered the FOV suitably. After solving, AT would "fix" the values for me anyway.

It does require a decent amount of CPU power and SSD/fast disk will help greatly. My old netbook couldn't handle it in a timely manner, so my trials were done on my main desktop.

I've now got a new laptop, and if the weather ever improves, I hope to try out AT more, and in particular try out the polar alignment functions within it.

[2stroke]

Sweet building a suitcase pc with an old quadcore q6600 overclocked to 3.2ghz, will try a ramdisk of 1gb haha, if you guys after after speed google up ramdisk, if you think a ssd is great wait till you try running one of these babys.

[lazjen]

A ramdisk is great, but in your case, you're limited to 1Gb of data. There's many Gb of data in the AT files. SSD works perfectly well for this.

Also, the tutorial shows 10 sec images being used. I generally use 5 sec ones, even from my light polluted backyard, and still get results (for my DSLR, I use ISO6400 or 25600 if I've gone insane or forgotten to change the setting :p ).