Hi Han,
Thank you very much Han for testing the program out! So there are several goals of my little project. One of them is to support ASTAP as an option, so maybe you can help me with an issue or two with that one! Basically, this program will provide a universal Solving interface for all platforms in QT.
Very shortly, I should have a new version for you to test, I have done a lot in the last week and made some significant improvements, including in the ASTAP interface.
The backslashes and forward slashes actually do not matter when using QT on Windows. In fact originally, I had it entering backslashes on Windows, but in the end, it ended up being much more reliable to just use forward slashes. The internal libraries that QT calls upon correct the backslash/forward slash differences and accept either as input. The backslashes, though, caused problems when calling the ANSVR astrometry.net. So if you would like, I could have it display the backslashes to the user to make things more familiar, but internally in the program, forward slashes across the board worked much better.
The default paths worked perfectly for the ANSVR installation on my testing computer. Is ANSVR installed properly on the system or do you have a different path to the programs? I thought it was pretty universal from what I saw. What error messages does ANSVR print out when you try to solve using the "Classic Method". Also, I should not that it isn't so "classic" on windows since this method of accessing ANSVR was not available before I wrote this interface in my program. If the INT SEP EXT SOLVER method works and the classic method does not, I think that would point to it being an issue with python or netpbm.
In terms of the solving in ASTAP vs. astrometry.net, vs the internal astrometry.net etc. Yes ASTAP is a pretty fast option, but doesn't always solve everything the other ones do from what I have seen. Astrometry.net is very sensitive to the settings that you put into it. If we can perfect the sextractor settings and astrometry.net settings, I think it could be fast like ASTAP. On my Mac, it is faster than ASTAP right now. On my Windows Testing machine, I think ASTAP is a little faster. But maybe also we could improve the ASTAP solving in the program by using more of the options. In my new version, I added more of them. It should be out this weekend.
Really my goal is to make all of them better, optimized and easy to use in a program with an interface, so anything you can do to help make it better, I appreciate.
So the name is the sexiest one I could come up with combining things like Sextractor, Solver, and Astrometry. Ultimately, the name of the library won't be displayed prominently on a user's computer since it will be internal to programs like KStars, so I don't think that will be a problem. But if I come up with a better name, I can certainly change it. It's a much better name than SextractorSolver or SESolver.
Thanks,
Rob