Tell your ASCOM mount to GOTO the original target position remembered a couple of steps ago.

If the plate solve succeeds then your ASCOM mount will be sync’d to the plate solved location.Remember the current target of your mount (RA/Dec).Send that frame to the plate solving application.Capture a single frame using the current camera and camera settings.If you press that button, SharpCap will perform the following steps automatically Using plate solving is incredibly easy – once you have your ASCOM mount set up and SharpCap has auto-detected a compatible plate solving application, you’ll notice a ‘Find My Location’ button appears in the mount control section just to the right of the DEC readout – like this: If you haven’t already connected your ASCOM mount in SharpCap, then you can begin by going to the SharpCap Settings dialog (on the File menu) and choosing the Hardware tab. Currently you can’t access the plate solving functionality if you don’t have an ASCOM mount connected (and even if you could, there wouldn’t be much that you could do with the solved location data anyway!) The other thing that you need to be able to start using plate solving from within SharpCap is an ASCOM compatible computer controlled mount, which must be set up for use in SharpCap. Fortunately each of the programs above will guide you through the installation of the index data.Īll three of the plate solving tools listed above are actually just wrappers around the open source ‘Astrometry.Net’ solver, so if you are trying to choose a plate solving tool from this list, make your choice based on the UI you prefer as the actual solving engine is basically the same for all three. Note that it’s not enough just to install the application – you also have to install the index data at suitable scales which can add up to several gigabytes of data. SharpCap will look in the default installation locations for these programs and use the first one it finds. Supported Plate Solving ToolsĬurrently SharpCap supports four plate solving toolsĪt least one of these tools must be installed and detected by SharpCap for plate solving to be available. To take advantage of it you need to have a supported plate solving tool installed on your computer and have connected SharpCap to your ASCOM compatible mount. With the press of a single button, SharpCap can automatically correct your mount’s position to ensure that your GOTO target is centered in the frame. Built in integration to plate solving applications is a powerful new feature in SharpCap 3.0.

Astronomy plate solving software