Andre Germain

Han, I dropped the shifted image solve as it was rarely working and anyway I already have the optical shift between the finder and main scope (and will adjust the finder closer soon). Ugly cloudy night, forest fire smoke and half moon yet astap rocks and centered the target in 15 seconds of two solves and two slews. I'll also work the tiff to thumbnail so it looks better.

Thanks Han, I'll look into your comments and work it out. I could compute the background of the original unshifted image and ste the pixels to that value. Why am I doing this? I can no longer count on Pinpoint ACP as it needs a reasonably well behaved and calibrated mount, it rarely solves and is incredibly slow as compared to astap. I have a 5 deg FOV finder and a guide camera 0.27 deg FOV at prime focus through a dichroic mirror. The script astap solves both images and computes the pixel offset...

Thanks Han, I'll look into your comments and work it out. I can no longer count on Pinpoint ACP as it needs a reasonably well behaved and calibrated mount. I have a 5 deg finder and a guide camera 0.27 deg FOV at prime focus through a dichroic mirror. The script astap solves both images and computes the pixel offset to match up the finder with the guide image, and shifts the finder image to solve it for the best solution to reslew to the target and had control over to ACP. Since this pixel offset...

Han, astap cannot solve this shifted image with zero pixels in the non image area. Could it if the pixels were not zero but some floor number? This is a 4.8 deg finder field with M57 approx in the center of the shifted image. It solves fine when the image is not shifted however so I suspect it doesn't like the zero pixels.

Han, astap cannot solve this shifted image with zero pixels in the non image area. Could it if the pixels were not zero but some floor number? This is a 4.8 deg finder field of Altair. It solves fine when the image is not shifted however so I suspect it doesn't like the zero pixels.

Han, astap can solve this shifted image with zero pixels in the non image area. Could it if the pixels were not zero but some floor number? This is a 4.8 deg finder field of Altair. It solves fine when the image is not shifted however so I suspect it doesn't like the zero pixels.

I brought it down to 5 and 3 on either images and it solves in a flash. Merci Han. Funny thing, it kept reslewing 25 arc min off and it was because ACP, Maxim DL and Guide9 all operate on J2000 but send JNow to the scope. I had to add the same correction JNow to J2000 when the scope's coordinates were sent to the script calling Astap as Astap of course solves in J2000 by default. Such a silly omission on my part. It slews back with dead center target now, thanks astap!

I brought it down to 5 and 3 on either images and it solves in a flash. Merci Han. Funny thing, it kept reslewing 25 arc min off and it was because Astap, ACP, Maxim DL Guide9 all operate on J2000 but send JNow to the scope (not Astap if course), so I had to add the same correction JNow to J2000 when the scope's coordinates were sent to the script calling Astap. Such a silly omission on my part. It slews back with dead center target now, thanks astap!