Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Tue, 02/23/2021 - 19:15
VPHOT will no longer plate solve any images processed through AstroImageJ. I know this because when I take that exact same image, upload it to nova.astrometry.net, and save it after being plate solved, VPHOT has no problem with it. This means now I have to upload EVERYTHING TO nova.astrometry.net just to do photometry and that's going to be a problem since I took over 200 images for a time series. Can someone help me out.
You could plate solve them in AIJ.
Cliff
Share an image that has failed with me on VPhot, user SGEO.
Also note the time when you uploaded that image so I can check the logs.
George
I went ahead and sent you the images. They are from three different cameras with two different camera operating software and every single one of them failed even after I went to nova.astrometry.net, got a key for AstroImageJ, and ran the plate solving software. So I don't think it's either the camera or the camera software.
Thank you very much for your help. I appreciate it very much.
I was able up upload 3MB .fit files using both Quick Upload and Upload Wizard. It's the larger images that is the problem. Upload Wizard keeps freezing up whenever the 40MB files I took with the ASI183MM is uploaded and when I try using Quick Upload, I get the following message.
Tim:
1. Subscribe to the VPhot forum.
2. A few posts have talked about upload problems with large images.
3. Do you really need to bin 1x1? Unless you have a very long focal length scope, I suspect you are distinctly oversampled?
4. Try 2x2 binning.
5. Do you save your images as 32 bit with AIJ? Try to save as 16 bit?
6. Does any of this help?
Ken
I check out the other threads on VPHOT.
It wasn't oversampled as much as defocused. The target star was W UMa, which could go as high as mag. 7.75. It was even saturating the pixels in the smaller 66mm doublet refractor I was using. When I tried to take shorter exposures, the image didn't come out quite right. So defocused my scope.
If I do that, wouldn't I have to redo my transformation for that scope? I do have another camera that I can use. I have an SBIG ST8 that produce a file size of only 3.1MB but the pixels are much larger so I would have defocus a bit to avoid saturation. Would that work?
If you mean when the images are calibrated, I did and it didn't change the size of the individual files.
So far, it doesn't look like I will be able to use the frames I took already. Unfortunately, this was a time series of the W UMa eclipsing binary, so it's almost 250 frames I won't be able to use unless I can take and submit data from another photometry program like IRIS, which I have.
One more thing: I took one of the images I wasn't able to plate solve in VPHOT and uploaded it to nova.astrometry.net, save the plate-solved image as a separate file and it was accepted by VPHOT. It seems the issue is with PinPoint.
Hey Tim,
I also save the "new-image.fits" created by astrometry.net and then use AstroImageJ to edit the fits header for adding the necessary info (OBJECT, RA, DEC, FILTER, etc.). And it works.
Gary
Unfortunately, I have over 240 images to process as I was trying to do a time series on an eclipsing binary (W Ursa Majoris), so I might have to try something or even do it all over again.