All Sky Plate solve

[Bassnut (Fred)]

Heres a free nifty new app that plate solves an image anywhere in the sky.

It needs Maxim DL and full pinpoint.

The only parameters it requires is plate scale (FL and pixel size), which it can extract from the image FITs file. The image can be from anywhere in the sky with any rotation angle.

Its called SkySolve . Processing time can take from minuites to DAYS though , depending on the FOV.

[citivolus (Ric)]

It looks like most of the computation time is in doing the preliminary shape processing, and that the matching may be much faster. I'd be curious to know how quickly the actual solve is done.

[DavidU (Dave)]

This looks interesting.

[jase (Jason)]

Nice one Fred. I actually gave this software a whirl. I had a couple of FITS subs take months ago in which I had a vague idea of the RA and DEC based on the target name. The subs themselves had not been plate solved. I ran them through the app. Works as advertised. Only took ~30min of data crunching to get the result. Certainly not the most efficient way of plate solving but when you don't know much about the image i.e. a base RA and DEC to start with it can help. This could potentially be used if you initial pointing was way off and you wanted to sync the scope to begin building a model. Though there are other ways around that.

[Bassnut (Fred)]

Thats good Jase, nice it worked, I havent tried it yet.

[citivolus (Ric)]

Originally Posted by jase

This could potentially be used if you initial pointing was way off and you wanted to sync the scope to begin building a model. Though there are other ways around that.

Meade actually have a patent for that. I can't remember the number offhand, but issued to them a few years back was a patent for automated telescope alignment via plate solving.