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When you are checking possibly a hundred plus images, both speed and accuracy are required so in my opinion Maxim wins hands down.
In Astrometrica as I understand it, there is no auto rotation of the image or image scaling - this is time consuming, Maxim does this automatically.
Plate solving and plotting asteroids can waste valuable time and is not needed when checking hundreds of images (unless you have all day to do the blinking, rotation, image scaling and plate solving) this is something quite easily done at the time a suspect object is found, there is much to rule out before reporting anything.
The latest mpcorb or astorb data plot some 540,000 minor planets, you can't rule out an unknown minor planet (or variable star known or unknown). There is no easy way around this, we have looked and it comes down to using the best tools available which at this stage still very much includes using your eyes.
It surprises me that there is no image subtraction software available to amateurs for this sort of work, if anyone knows of any please let me know.
My own discoveries thus far have been a direct comparison with my reference images, no blinking just real time eyeballing. If you decide to blink the images it may open up other problems - if you leave them until next day to check then you may lose your discovery to others ie CHASE etc. You also only have one image and under the new reporting guidelines this is not acceptable (can't even get it on the unconfirmed page) so you will then have to wait to get another image, more time lost, yet something you could have done straight away with the successful (for me anyway) but lesser numbers real time eyeball method I use.
PeterM.
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