Plate Solving with BYE Premium

[hdoraisamy]

Apologize I am asking another basic question on plate-solving with AstroTortilla with BYE.

I have the classic version of BYE and I use a telephoto lens on my DSLR with a tracker but no auto-guider and no EQ mount.

I have installed Astro Tortilla on my windows laptop and know that it can solve an image that I feed during the daytime (at least most of the time) based on the logs.

If I upgrade to BYE Premium, what can I expect from the Astro Tortilla integration?

If I take a  picture of the night sky, will AstroTortilla solve the image and label my image on the BYE screen? Is that how its supposed to work? 

 

[astroman133]

The way it works is that you use a planetarium program or the physical hand controller to slew your telescope to a place in the sky. Then with AstroTortilla set up to use the BYE camera you tell AT to center on that location. AT asks BYE to take a picture. BYE takes the picture and saves it temporarily to your hard drive. It returns the file path of the image file to AT. AT reads and solves the image to learn the coordinates of the center of the image. From being connected to your scope it also knows where the scope thinks that it is pointing. It syncs to the center of the image and then tells the scope to slew to the target coordinates. It then asks BYE to capture another image and repeats the process until it is within the specified tolerance.

So, for your setup it will only work if there is an ASCOM driver for your tracker that AT can read and slew with. Also, I have never tried solving a telephoto image, so I don't know how it will do with the shorter focal length.

[hdoraisamy]

@astroman133 Thank you for the explanation. That is helpful. You're right - it is unlikely to help with the way I do astrophotography. I currently plate solve by uploading to astronomy.net and wait my turn. I was hoping AT would give me faster platesolving capabilities

 

[astroman133]

If you can get the local AT to solve your picture it may be faster than uploading to the astrometry server, but can Astro Tortilla control the tracker? If not, then you may be out of luck as far as closed loop centering goes.

With AT properly tuned I can use AT and BYE or an ASCOM camera to center on my imaging target in less than a minute. The biggest advantage is getting exactly back to the same target on subsequent sessions.

[hdoraisamy]

My tracker is the Move Shoot Move - I do not believe it can control the tracker. Are there commercially available software that can be installed locally and plate solve faster than astronomy.net?  

[astroman133]

AstroTortilla can solve it locally for you.