I was wondering if anybody else has problems solving images against GSC 1.1 in the vicinity of 11h17m +29d40' (VZ UMa is one of my favourite targets.) I know this is somewhat off topic, but it slows my photometry so I beg your indulgence.
I use Maxim and PinPoint LE to refine pointing of my telescope but there is a large area (several degrees?) including this position for which PinPoint always responds ' no stars were found in the catalog', even on deep images. I've reinstalled the GSC using DC3 Dreams's installer and still no luck. From the filenames and sizes in the GSC folder there appear to be no files missing or truncated.
If everybody has this problem I guess I'll have to live with it, otherwise I'll go to DC3 Dreams and/or Cyanogen to see if it's a problem with their software (though I suspect not since I have no such problem anywhere else in the sky.)
Rick W
Hi Rick,
I use the USNO A2 database with Pinpoint - it has many more stars down to ~20th mag. If you want this database, let me know and I can provide a download link.
-- Dave Lane (dave@davelane.ca)
What is the size of the field of view, for these images that don't plate-solve?
Hi Dave, Eric:
The fields are 14 x 18', lots of stars - Earth-Centred Universe plots 24 GSC stars in the field and my images have hundreds. I already have the USNO A2 (thanks anyway Dave) but it's larger than I really want to put on my observatory computer (notebook with only a 32GB SSD.) And this failure happens on my desktop (both Win7 and virtualbox Win7 under Fedora), laptop and observatory notebook.
Rick
Hi,
maybe your position is off and that is the reason Pinpoint is unable to solved against the coordinates in the fits header. If my mount has lost position and I use PP to solve an image taken via MAXIM then it does not like to solve it even after 3 min of runtime. Only astronomy.net or PRISm`s plate solver can help in this case.
My FOV is much larger (50x50 arcmin^2) however even then PP gets lost in case of wrong pointing. It does not help what catalogue you choose.
Maybe it helps.
Josch
No, the position is within probably 5'. And PinPoint doesn't even get to the point of trying to solve - it finds stars in the image and then immediately reports that there are no stars in the (GSC) catalogue and stops.
I'll see if I can get some support from DC3 Dreams.
Rick