Interesting read, don't let it get too serious guy's
Only about 50% of my images successfully plate solve, hence my original enquiry for non-platesolve dependent methods. They don't plate solve due to small FOV (and to a lesser degree star brightness). My images are all captured in an automated fassion and most objects are central enough in the image to still use even if the platesolve is a failure.
I hadn't thought of Astrometrica. I have a license but always forget about the package
The subtraction method is of interest to me as purely a way to automate the detection rather than eyeballing the images. I would have thought it would be possible to use various normalising, de-noising, etc methods to get a meaningful subtraction result. But, not volunteering to write the software myself I can understand there's likely a good reason it doesn't exist for us already.
I'm not much concerned about minor planets being in the FOV at this stage, but can see the potential for having them "get in the way". I think step one is for me to find what I think is a nova before being concerned if it really is one
Blinking is looking the most viable option at thi stage. I already have reduction and alignment of images automated so have realised that even though it would be a bit time intensive I can open up the sets of aligned images and blink them without going through CCDSoft's supernova/minor planet routines which require platesolving.
Thanks,
Roger.