plate solve without a guess?

Software Siril
1

I was hoping to be able to do a scripted plate solve as part of my automated workflow, but it seems siril needs a guess at the origin.

If I invoke astronometry (locally) with a guess it solves within seconds, and it’s more like a minute without a guess (but I give a range for my pixel scale). I could live with that, at least for the focal lengths I am interested in. Is there any way, or any chance siril could be opened up in the future, I can get plate solving working from siril without a location guess?

2

RTFM, ok I was rereading the docs, and hidden in it was this gem:

-blindpos

which solves my question exactly. Platesolving — Siril 1.4.0-beta4 documentation

For some reason, this didn’t come up when I was looking for help in the console.

If I could delete the question I would, apologies. But this forum doesn’t let me edit or delete my posts.

3

argh, except

platesolve [-force] [image_center_coords] [-focal=] [-pixelsize=]
platesolve sequencename ... [-noflip] [-downscale] [-order=] [-radius=] [-disto=]
platesolve sequencename ... [-limitmag=[+-]] [-catalog=] [-nocrop]
platesolve sequencename ... [-localasnet [-blindpos] [-blindres]]

only works when applying it to a sequence name.

4

ok, I am very stupid. The following command work

platesolve -localasnet -focal=590

but I can’t get -blindres to work.

5

Hi,

You’ve mentionned blinpos before but your last post was about blindres. Which characteristics do you need astrometry.net to guess?

Cheers

C.

6

I’m wanting fully blind position and focal length. That way I can script it without needing to input any details about the scope. I’m ok if that takes minutes instead of seconds, as I’ll be off having my lunch or something while it works. Same script, different setups.

7

Can you send me an image where

platesolve -localcasnet -blindpos -blindres

does not work?
Because I use that a lot when users send us pictures that Siril can’t solve but they did not get the resolution right.

The log where it fails would be great as well. Pls enable the output of astrometry.net to be captured in the Console. This is done in the Preferences tab. Tick the show solve-filed output at the bottom.

image
image824×730 36.3 KB

8

You know, I haven’t actually tried! I have been taking the docs at their word for it and because the combination wasn’t documented I assumed it was unsupported. I will try again, but the very fact you do it regularly tells me it should work.

9

If I was able to input min/max focal length and min/max DEC, that could potentially speed it up significantly.

10

The options are documented here: Commands — Siril 1.4.0-beta4 documentation
and using the combination -blindpos/-blindres is addressed in the last section Astrometry.net solver options:

For min/max Dec, it’s not possible as it’s not an option for the solve-field application, see its documentation: solve-field(1) — astrometry.net — Debian testing — Debian Manpages

Regarding focal length, it’s actually used together with the pixel size to calculate a sampling. You can increase the tolerance to sampling in the Preferences:

image
image505×102 2.31 KB

up to 50%. So you could specify the focal length that gives the mean sampling of the range to explore and play with the pref to investigate the full range.

Regarding speed, have you enabled parallel computing for the solve-field application? Platesolving — Siril 1.4.0-beta4 documentation

1 Like
11

Thank you!

I should explain: my reading and processing machines are physically separate so I wasn’t able to experiment to try combinations that weren’t explicitly documentated, I should really have had a few trials anyway. In any case, I think I am misunderstanding the documentation as I still read this

seqplatesolve sequencename ... [-localasnet [-blindpos] [-blindres]]

As meaning that the sequencename is a required parameter.

And I now recall why this did not work for me, I am not using the beta. When I try this command in 1.2 I get

10:54:49: Invalid argument -blindpos, aborting.
10:54:49: Error in line 4 ('platesolve'): invalid arguments.

which I presume is expected.

13

Ok, there are two things here:

  • in your first post, you were mentioning the command platesolve. Now you are referring to seqplatesolve documentation. The first is for solving a single image, the latter for a sequence. Obviously, the second needs a sequence name. Apart from that, both can accept -blindpos and -blindres. So you have to use the right command depending on what you are trying to solve.
  • Those additional options to -localasnet were not available in 1.2.6
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14

Ah, I’ve checked our tooltip, indeed in platesolve documentation, there’s a wrong sequencename added, I’ll fix the docs. The confusion came from the fact you were showing the seqplatesolve command.

1 Like
15

The documentation is now updated

16

awesome, thank you! And all the more reason for me to upgrade to 1.4.

EDIT: and yay, I can edit comments now!

1 Like