Blind Solver

[Juan Conejero]

The future of this script may well be to integrate with astrometry.net

Good point, but depending on an online service is problematic and limits functionality. Another solution would be integrating astrometry.net's source code (or relevant portions of it) in an open-source PixInsight module. That would solve all portability problems. It would be a hard task for sure, but I think it is perfectly doable. Unfortunately the GPL license prevents this possibility.

[Nocturnal]

Right, there are certainly drawbacks to depend on online services. So I keep Elbrus around if I'm desperate to solve an image

[Nocturnal]

As far as GPL goes it's quite possible that the a.n team is willing to grant us a license if we write an open source PI solver based on their code. I haven't looked at the code in detail but it appears that most functionality is already organized in libraries so that would simplify things a bit. Clearly the drawback of having a large collection of executables glued together with python is that converting a set of these executables into a single dll could be tricky if there are data naming conflicts.

So I guess the question is "who would want to take on this project and do it for free"

[Nocturnal]

Ok, with some makefile futsing I got astrometry.net to compile completely using cygwin. I'll be trying out the script and see if that can be made to work as well.

[Nocturnal]

Hmm, that's not working. I didn't see any security settings to modify. Is this generally disabled for windows?

Code: [Select]

Writing file:
C:/Users/sander/AppData/Local/Temp/PixinsightTmpDir/orig.jpg
Compressing JPEG: 3 channel(s), 2994x1977 pixels: 100%
BlindSolverEngine.solveFile():commandLine=time solve-field -u arcminwidth -L 200 -H 250 --no-plots --downsample 2 -d 30 C:/Users/sander/AppData/Local/Temp/PixinsightTmpDir/orig.jpg
Executing external command
exception caught in solveFile:Error: Console.execute(): operation forbidden as per global security settings.
BlindSolverEngine::deleteDir(): dirName=C:/Users/sander/AppData/Local/Temp/PixinsightTmpDir
BlindSolverEngine::deleteDir(): names=C:/Users/sander/AppData/Local/Temp/PixinsightTmpDir/orig.jpg
BlindSolverEngine::deleteDir(): fileName=C:/Users/sander/AppData/Local/Temp/PixinsightTmpDir/orig.jpg
BlindSolver Script done
*** Error [000]: C:/PCL64/dist/BlindSolver5.js, line 836: Could not solve this image


[Juan Conejero]

Hi Sander,

Error: Console.execute(): operation forbidden as per global security settings.

Select Edit > Security Settings and enable 'Allow execution of commands from JavaScript scripts'. An improved security system will be implemented in the next version, which is much more flexible and can operate on a per-module and per-script basis. For now, you have to enable a global security option to get this script running.

[Nocturnal]

Doh! Never noticed that menu item before. It's interesting that that is one of the few traditional dialog boxes with 'apply' and 'cancel' buttons.

[georg.viehoever]

Hi Sander,

see also http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=1857.msg11347#msg11347 where Ioannis tried a Cygwin port. Even when you get it going, I would expect that it is slow due to Cygwin's slow file operations. The Blind Solver is rather disk intense...

Cheers,
Georg

[Nocturnal]

Hi Georg,

when I had it working it was fast enough to be useful. Probably because I have reasonably wide fields and constant resolution. I tried to solve my most recent image and that didn't work though. I've asked Dustin for help. Neither my Ubuntu nor Cygwin compiles can solve it but a.net solved it in seconds. I must be doing something wrong.

[georg.viehoever]

Sander,

in my examples, using the downsample option (I think something like -d 2) usually helped. Also, BlindSolver seems to be better at solving unprocesssed images that processed images. In some processed images, it helps to make them more dim (e.g. with moving the midtones slider in Histogram transform to the right). I also had a few images that I was not able to solve, such as Vicent's M51 (which is heavily processed), but I dont know if the web version would have solved these.

Georg

[Nocturnal]

Hi Georg,

the web version never has any trouble solving my images as long as I don't screw up It'll happily solve in a few seconds in most cases. Unless they have some studdly mega-cloud computer sitting behind astrometry.net I have to think I can do equally fast on my PC. So far that's been elusive so I'm still trying to work this out. My goal is actually to add more objects to the NGC catalog as I think it's far to shallow right now. I've asked Dustin to add more catalogs to his lookup but got no response on this so far. Looking at the code it's clear why. The objects are hardcoded in C files, it doesn't use catalogs.

[georg.viehoever]

Sander,

I think the machine behind the Astronomy.net solver web server is an 48 GB multicore server. The key factor for its speed is that all catalogs fit into its RAM... at least thats what I believe. Blind Solver gets slow when going into the larger catalogs>1GB on my machine, which is plausible for a 2 GBytes machine.

I cannot help with catalog building, but I understand that all necessary tools are part of the astronomy.net distribution..

Georg

[Astrocava]

Sander,

in my examples, using the downsample option (I think something like -d 2) usually helped. Also, BlindSolver seems to be better at solving unprocesssed images that processed images. In some processed images, it helps to make them more dim (e.g. with moving the midtones slider in Histogram transform to the right). I also had a few images that I was not able to solve, such as Vicent's M51 (which is heavily processed), but I dont know if the web version would have solved these.

Georg

Hi George,

Would be possible to solve a unprocessed image and then use the output into the processed one?

Have fun!

Sergio

[georg.viehoever]

Hi George,

Would be possible to solve a unprocessed image and then use the output into the processed one?

Yes, that would be possible. Just copy the FITS keywords that are set in the solved image.

Georg

[pfile]

hmm, on osx x86_64 i'm getting "exception caught in solveFile:TypeError: Console.execute is not a function"

sure enough in the javascript editor, i don't see a method called "execute" under console.

so is there an alternate way to execute an external program from javascript on osx, or is this just an osx x86_64 weirdness?