Astro Tortilla

[naskies (Dave)]

Originally Posted by RobF

How are you with VB.NET Dave? I've got some code for this in my drift alignment program if of any interest.

Sounds good! Before the biomedical world, I used to program COM+ components in Visual C++... so it's nice to be on the scripting/user side of that equation

My main challenge is to get AstroTortilla working

At the moment, I've just been manually adding 4 points for each pier side (three spread out along the horizon plus one near zenith) which gets me pretty close to everything. When I'm about to image a target, a couple iterations of goto-capture-solve-sync seems to get me to within my EQ6's accuracy limits.

[RobF (Rob)]

Originally Posted by naskies

Sounds good! Before the biomedical world, I used to program COM+ components in Visual C++... so it's nice to be on the scripting/user side of that equation

My main challenge is to get AstroTortilla working

At the moment, I've just been manually adding 4 points for each pier side (three spread out along the horizon plus one near zenith) which gets me pretty close to everything. When I'm about to image a target, a couple iterations of goto-capture-solve-sync seems to get me to within my EQ6's accuracy limits.

Actually you'd need to buy the full version of Pinpoint I've remembered now. Maxim won't let you call plate solving objects etc without that (unless you write keyboard calling scripts which is messy). I just think Pinpoint is the bees-knees in plate solving. I'd only ever tried Elbrus and found it tricky though - never Astro T.

[g__day (Matthew)]

Astro Tortilla seems to plate solve well once you have the image scale set well. My only annoyance with it is that it tries to correct pointing by issuing a sync - and if you're running software with a Tpoint model being protected this is a big no-no! I wish it could determine pointing error and correct without a sync being issued - but the developers say they aren't going to work on these sort of enhancements until after August.

[naskies (Dave)]

Originally Posted by RobF

Actually you'd need to buy the full version of Pinpoint I've remembered now. Maxim won't let you call plate solving objects etc without that (unless you write keyboard calling scripts which is messy). I just think Pinpoint is the bees-knees in plate solving. I'd only ever tried Elbrus and found it tricky though - never Astro T.

Yep, I really like PinPoint - it's so fast when the target is in the search area.

Originally Posted by g__day

Astro Tortilla seems to plate solve well once you have the image scale set well.

Hmmm... do you provide the binned or unbinned (x1) image scale for the image scale? Maybe that was causing my grief - I provided the image scale for the 4x binning I use for plate solving, but the range wasn't wide enough to include the 1x binning image scale. I'll give it a go next time.

My only annoyance with it is that it tries to correct pointing by issuing a sync - and if you're running software with a Tpoint model being protected this is a big no-no! I wish it could determine pointing error and correct with a sync being issued - but the developers say they aren't going to work on these sort of enhancements until after August.

What about on the T point side? Is there a feature to make it ignore syncs (EQMOD has this feature)?

I'm keen to make AstroTortilla work, as I find EQMOD's model to be very, very accurate for my EQ6 - much more so than a 100 point model in MaxPoint.

[g__day (Matthew)]

The Sky6 can easily ignore syncs, the issue being Astro Tortilla only re-points by saying where do you think you should be - solving and re-sync'ing then going the co-ordinates again - now assuming this coords will be correctly pointed to!

What I would like is it to correct pointing without issuing the sync; say it works out is X off in RA and Y in DEC - then issue a goto currrent RA + X and Current DEC + Y - which should be simple!