#Plate solving software manual
Back to why this is useful: The manual action required by the human to look through the eyepiece and provide feedback to the mount about where it is pointing just went away! You don’t even need to be close to the telescope… and yes, as the “ All Sky late Solver” claims, you can now sell your finder ?.
#Plate solving software software
You take a picture and the software calculates exactly where the telescope is pointing automatically by matching the pattern of stars in the picture to known star catalogues. Plate solving comes to the rescue replacing the human action of looking through the finder and manually pointing to the star in order to tell the mount where the telescope is pointing. This alignment process is a way to tell the mount where exactly the telescope is pointing, so that it can “go to” more accurately to a target when you ask it to. Each mount manufacturer, depending on the mount type, has also other ways to achieve this that today range from assisting you to do near perfect polar alignment to self aligning mounts (however, no equatorial self aligning mount exists to my knowledge). Then the mount knows where the telescope is currently pointing and can “go to” where you ask it to point. The user then, for each star, makes a manual correction to point exactly to the star and the mount takes this correction into account, compensating for any alignment errors (no alignment is perfect!). Each mount manufacturer has a way to achieve this, most commonly by firstly polar aligning the mount and then automatically pointing to a set of (1,2,3 or more) stars. Why is this important / useful? There are various ways to ask your telescope mount to automatically point somewhere in the sky (Goto function). This is done by analyzing the pattern of stars in the image and matching it with known star catalogues. Today plate solving essentially means to analyze a digital astronomical image and figure out where exactly it points in the sky.
Last night I tried for the first time the “Point Craft” feature of APT (the Astro Photography Tool) and I was amazed!įirst thing first, what is “plate solving” ? I guess the term “plate” comes from older times when astronomical images were taken using photographic “plates”.