Analyse stars _still_ fails

@schullerfred

not sure I can be much help but when that happened to me App gave a list of things to change to better help it detect more stars. Did it not do this for you?

@tonymacc

No, the only suggestion is to contact the support.

I remember that there were many options to fine tune this step in a previous version of APP, now we can only set an upper limit to the number of stars detected...

Dear Fred @schullerfred,

If APP 1.077 still fails on your data, I really want to see it. Apologies that is not working yet.

Can you upload data here?

https://ariesprodstor.astropixelprocessor.com:7001/

login and username: appuser

Please create a folder with your name and let me know once uploaded. Please upload lights and all the calibration masters that you have for calibrating the dataset so we can do a proper test and fix this issue 😉 as soon as possible

Kind regards,

Mabula

Dear Fred @schullerfred,

We have 4 light frames in our possesion already and I have checked them quickly.

I am not surprised that APP is failing here, I think something is going wrong with your data capture process and therefore the data is not compatible for Astro Pixel Processor at the moment.

Look at the stretched histogram of the data, something is not going right here.

What software did you use to capture the data? The metadata does not provide much information so it seems to come from software in a very early development fase?

FITS HDUs: 1
HDU1 - SIMPLE = T / Java FITS: Sat Sep 21 21:46:59 CEST 2019
HDU1 - BITPIX = 16
HDU1 - NAXIS = 2 / Dimensionality
HDU1 - NAXIS1 = 1936
HDU1 - NAXIS2 = 1096
HDU1 - PCOUNT = 0 / No extra parameters
HDU1 - GCOUNT = 1 / One group
HDU1 - EXTEND = T / Extension permitted
HDU1 - OBSERVER= ' '
HDU1 - TELESCOP= ' '
HDU1 - ORIGIN = ' '
HDU1 - OBJECT = 'DSO '
HDU1 - DATE-OBS= '2019-09-21T09:46:49.244'
HDU1 - CAMERA = 'ZWO ASI385MC'
HDU1 - CCDTEMP = '17.1 '
HDU1 - EXPTIME = '10.000001'
HDU1 - END

Then in addition the fits metadata is not created correctly to be able to read this for 16bits output. The data is currently not in 16bits format, the maximum value is 16383 which is 14bits output. The fits metadata should make this clear with the Bscale parameter somehow, this keyword is not even there so any software package will not know what to do with this data unless explicitly informed by the sofware user.

Kind regards,

Mabula

Dear Mabula @mabula-admin

thanks for looking into that. I'm recording the data with FireCapture. I am using version 2.6, on Mac. I thought that it was a standard capture software, therefore I'm a bit surprised that it doesn't do the things right...

But indeed, my camera has only 12 bits dynamic range, and FireCapture allows only to choose between 8 bits and 16 bits. What capture software would you recommend (on a Mac) for better compatibility with APP?

Regards,

Fred

@mabula-admin

I have just uploaded two more lights (and a master dark) that I observed in december, and for which also star analysis fails (actually APP finds 6 stars in one case but fails in the other one, although they look both very similar). At least the histograms don't look that weird. This was with the same capture software, same telescope and same camera as the previous ones.

@mabula-admin

One more thing: I should add that in other cases (typically when there are more stars visible in my lights), APP runs perfectly well, including star analysis and registration... I agree that, in the case of M57, the histograms look pretty weird, but I don't think that the capture software is the only responsible for these frequent failures.

Best regards,

Fred