Hi,
I have been trying to plate solve - both blind and with local UCAC4 for jpeg images but no luck thus far. I have varied every input possible but still not luck - I get the error message every time. The images are large - 4928 x 3264 pixels - taken with Hyperstar and representing approximately 1.75 x 1.15 degrees. Pixel size is 4.78 x 4.78. I have reduced the frame size as suggested in the error message but no effect.
The image is correctly oriented - it is mirrored to compensate for the telescope. I am not aware of any place to enter a position angle - is this needed?
I would very much appreciate any help as this is what I purchased the Observatory software for.
Thanks for you help.
Richard
Hi Richard,
When you tried blind plate solving, did you also try it with the option "Upload whole image"? Is there any particular reason why you are using a JPEG for this? You may have more luck with FITS or a RAW image format because JPEG has such limited dynamic range and the star detector may reject the stars, thinking they are over-exposed or even hot pixels. Is this a monochrome or RGB image? An image with such large FOV shouldn't require UCAC4. Observatory's built-in Tycho-2 catalog should suffice. If nothing works, then please share one of your images using Dropbox with support@codeobsession.com, so I can take a closer look.
Sander
Hi Sander,
Yes, I tried "upload whole image". The camera is a Nikon D7000 DLSR and the images are Fine JPEG colour. I'll try a Raw image and see how that goes. I'll also set the catalog to Tycho.
I'm hunting for comets (have been since 1980 - closest call was in 2007 just arc minutes from Terry Lovejoy's second comet :-[)
Thanks
Richard