Astrotortilla - goto calib, plate solving, polar alignment

troypiggo (Troy) · #1 24-02-2012, 06:21 AM

Anyone tried Astrotortilla? Stumbled across it tonight. From the website:

Quote:

AstroTortilla wraps together software used in astrophotography to easily achieve:

sub-arcminute GoTo accuracy,
fully automatic blind GoTo calibration and
fast, quantitative polar alignment

by using plate solver software to work out the coordinates of a stellar photo.

The initial version supports Maxim DL and Nebulosity2 for camera control, any ASCOM-compatible computerized tracking mount and astrometry.net plate solver engine. The software is designed to be expandable and contributions for supporting more software are welcome. The current version is tested on 32-bit Windows, and there are several known issues in 64-bit environments with the current binaries. Running directly from version control may work better as an interim solution until 64-bit builds are available.

peter_4059 (Peter) · #2 24-02-2012, 10:31 AM

Sounds a bit like sequence generator.

mswhin63 (Malcolm) · #3 24-02-2012, 10:58 AM

The program is based on Astrometry.net plate solving. I use this site for some of my images but have had very little success. I so far have had very little success getting it to work on my PC as well but still trying.

Vostok (Lauri) · #4 25-02-2012, 12:40 AM

Greetings from the AstroTortilla team in Finland!

The new http://nova.astrometry.net/ service is indeed quite unreliable. Their old web user interface for solving does a much better job but isn't open to everyone anymore.

Running Astrometry.net under Windows requires Cygwin but is a real pain to compile and get in working order. We host a custom software repository that provides compiled binaries working in Cygwin with no hassle. The AstroTortilla installer is by far the easiest way to install Astrometry.net locally, even if you'd not use AstroTortilla. Just be sure to read the Getting Started PDF before installing to make sure it won't fail.

We'd be happy to hear if you get AstroTortilla working down under!

Lauri

PS. Now you can try out APT for camera control, too.

mswhin63 (Malcolm) · #5 25-02-2012, 01:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vostok

We'd be happy to hear if you get AstroTortilla working down under!

Lauri

PS. Now you can try out APT for camera control, too.

Thanks Lauri, I was wanting to get it working specifically for APT. I hope to get it sorted one day. I have the Indices I need for my scope/camera combination.