Trying to answer my own question.
I don't have access to the real northern sky, but I have done an experiment by using a tablet as the sky by opening SkySafari on it and let my mount takes images of the screen
I blocked the screen for like around 40% and EKOS platesolve works effectively. I've pushed it and found if I covered more than half of the FOV then the platesolve will fail.
So if the FOV not block more than 40% I think it's fine.
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Thank you. Didn't realize camera can be an auxiliary device. I set up the camera and it works! Thanks again!
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So I'd look at arc-min accuracy with the polar alignment assistant tool. Then for a more accurate alignment then I'll go to the drift tool.
Another question is that would Ekos consider to support additional camera (i.e. 3rd camera) in the equipment profile.
What I have is a rainbowastro mount, and there're no optical polarscope.
And I made myself a DIY "polemaster" like setup, which is an ASI 178 camera with a 50mm CCTV lens, mounting with the polemaster adapter locked rainbowastro mount body, and attempting to use Ekos polar alignment assistance.
I'm using OAG to guide - the OAG mounted to the main scope and will be too narrow for the polar alignment assistance to pickup at the platesolve.
So there're 3 cameras operating at the same time: the one used for polar alignment, the guide cam at the OAG and the main CCD.
What I'm doing now is to connect to different profiles: First I connect to a profile where the ASI 178 as the guidecam with the 50mm lens, and do the polar alignment.
After the polar alignment is done I will have to disconnect, and switch the equipment profile for guiding and imaging. This would work, but is a little time-consuming.
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Hi Everyone,
I've setup my ASI 178 with a CCTV lens (50mm) and the FOV is 510 arcmin * 343.2 arcmin
I'm attempting to use the polar alignment assistant tool and knowing that it requires platesolve to work.
At my observing site (which is a remote site) there're trees blocking part of the view (see picture attached).
So my question is that if part of the view is blocked, would this affect the platesolve?
Stephen
Hi Everyone,
I've setup my ASI 178 with a CCTV lens (50mm) and the FOV is 510 arcmin * 343.2 arcmin
I'm attempting to use the polar alignment assistant tool and knowing that it requires platesolve to work.
At my observing site (which is a remote site) there're trees blocking part of the view (see picture attached).
So my question is that if part of the view is blocked, would this affect the platesolve?
Stephen
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A few questions:
If the hand controller is not connected to RST-135, can EKOS/KStars update the date to the mount?
If cannot, I'd assume the goto would not work. Would the autoguide be affected?
Can the RST-135 accept connection from Wifi with SkySafari, and at the same time accept autoguiding commands from USB?
Thanks!
Stephen
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Although I do not own a rainbow - my Temma2 experience the same problem messing up the DEC direction during different imaging & platesolving sessions. After some testing, I've found that I have to start the mount by pointing at the eastern side of sky, and platesolve at the eastern hemisphere. After a successful platesolve then slew to the target. The RA/DEC movement will then always correct. If I start platesolving at the western hemisphere, the slew direction of the DEC would be reversed (I can't remember it's always the case or sometimes). It's strange that both KStar and SkySafari shows the mount is slewing in one way, but the mount is actually slewing in an opposite direction - and that would definitely messed up the goto.I just ran another experiment and it does seem to be slewing the wrong direction - in at least one axis. I reset everything again with the scope pointing west (as close as possible anyway). I manually slewed to north and was able to plate solve again and the mount pointing seemed to show around the right location (90 deg DEC && the approximate correct latitude for my location - ~37deg). I then attempted to slew to an object that was higher in the sky than Polaris and to the northwest (effectively higher and more westward than the current location at that time). Instead however it slewed to a location to the northeast. After slewing, the coordinates shown in Ekos seemed right (AZ ~326 deg / ALT 56 deg). However the scope definitely slewed to the east instead of west. The altitude seems like it was probably about right.
I saw some others having similar problems. Although without good explanation on such behaviour, try always platesolve pointing at the eastern side and see if that resolves the problem.
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In my case: I have EKOS installed on RPI4 (4Gb) and I uses VNC to remote from my MacBook Air 11". I set VNC the resolution is 1366 * 768 which matches the monitor display. My imaging camera is ATik 490ex which the image size is 3379*2903. You can see the image at a much higher resolution than my monitor.
At my imaging session, I usually has to zoom in and out to check a few things:
At low resolution, I wanted to see the overall image like the object position, orientations are good.
At high resolution, I'd like to check for alignment (i.e. any star trailing) or may be focus shift or look for other artifacts
For my case, loading the full image into the memory is in fact a waste of resources - my monitor cannot display all the pixels.
If I want to check focus shifts or alignment problems I only need to look at part of the image to find out.
I'm not sure a magnifying glass approach would be worth to look at? Like the FITS viewer would initially show the preview at low resolution, which can be pre-generated. Display this low-resolution at the FITS viewer. Then on mouse-over (or may be a mouseclick is better) to load that part of the image from disk with an area say 50x50 and show that part as 1:1 (or may be magnified 2:1) in a "magnified" image box?
Stephen
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