Hello Rob,

See my remarks:

rlancaste wrote: Hi Hank,
1. So I was thinking that both SEP and local Sextractor were working pretty well with ASTAP, are you saying that the built in star extraction should be preferred with ASTAP, or are you saying that the other methods don't work with ASTAP.

In august I decided to remove the .XYLS input. I was not so happy with the "cleanness" of the code and the internal ASTAP extractor performs very similar, so I removed the option to use sextractor as indicated here:
www.indilib.org/forum/general/6845-new-i...html?start=288#58378

rlancaste wrote: Hi Hank,
2. I am not sure what you mean by "part of the log is missing". Are you saying the log information is not getting into the Ekos log at the bottom of the Align Module or are you saying that it isn't appearing in a log file?
Of the ASTAP log only the first line is reported in Astrometrylog.txt. The next line line "using

Of the ASTAP log only the first line is reported in Astrometrylog.txt. The next line lines "using G17..." are not reported in AstrometryLog.txt. See red marked part of the log.

rlancaste wrote: Hi Hank,
3. The search radius can easily be set in the Options Profile, along with many other options. The default for all the profiles is 15 degrees, but can easily be changed by the user.

Good, I missed that.

rlancaste wrote: Hi Hank,
4. For downsampling, currently I have it using the downsample option selected by the user in the options profile. There is also an auto downsample option. So you are saying here that if the user has the auto downsample option selected, then we should still pass the z parameter with a "0", since currently we only pass the parameter if they have something other than 1 selected. Or am I misunderstanding this?

The downsampling can be set in Ekos. That is good no change required. Adding the extra option : "-z 0" prevents that ASTAP does a second additional binning. It is the safest option for the case the user accessed ASTAP directly and forced a binning=2x2 in the ASTAP settings.

rlancaste wrote: Hi Hank,
5. We can definitely process the warnings, that should not be too hard. I will be sure to do that. But are you meaning that the information should be displayed in the log at the bottom of the Align module or in a separate log file?
For the idea of displaying information as discussed in #2 and #5, we do have options in KStars for the user to be able to decide whether they want to display the information in a separate log file, if they want everything to be displayed at the bottom in the Align module, and if they want to save all that to a combined log file. I am just asking to clarify what you meant about what you said.

The ASTAP warning(s) are useful since it warns the user of incorrect pixel-scale/focal length which could result in a poorer performance. The ASTAP log contains all warnings and error messages. That is probably the easiest solution. Alternatively you could read the program exit code for ERROR or the keywords WARNING or ERROR of the ini file or the WARNING keyword of the .wcs file.

I would prefer to have at least the warning implemented so either read the full log or read the string behind the "WARNING =" keyword in the .wcs file are the easiest way to implement.

Cheers, Han

Read More...