#38 Error decoding Julian day

[Joerg Spelda]

Dear Han,

recently, when I came back to ASTAP after a few months I noticed the message "Error decoding Julian day" in several of my series (those modified by Muniwin and Siril; not in original Seestar smarttelescope files). Strangely the "Date (start)" was always correctly given. I searched for the reason and found the following:
These programs add a TIME tag documenting the creation or modification of the file (see attachment). If ASTAP finds a TIME tag it uses it for calculation of JD:
- if no time part is present, the cited error message (Error decoding Julian day) occurs
- if a time part is present the TIME tag is used for calculating the JD and HJD, and thus gives a wrong date

I was able to remove the TIME tag with the FITS header editor of Phoranso and then JD and HJD were calculated correctly.
Could you please fix that bug, especially for all who are not able to use Phoranso or a similar FITS header editor.

Additional questions
- Is there a FITS header editor (beside the manual one with copy/paste) in ASTAP?
- What is the function of Tools -> Batch processing -> Set files date modified to DATE-OBS?

All the best
Jörg

[Joerg Spelda]

Dear Han,

sorry, I meant a DATE tag and not a TIME tag that is present and used instead of the DATE-OBS tag.

All the best
Jörg

[han.k]

Hi Joerg,

Thanks for the feedback. This problem was already detected a few days ago. It has been fixed in the ASTAP development version:

http://www.hnsky.org/astap_setup.exe

There are probably 10 different ways to write the date&time in the header. A month ago I added the possibility to read DATE-BEG but by doing that I broke the functionality reading your file format. But that has now been fixed.

Nice image from ZWO Seestar!

Cheers, Han