2021-10-11, 01:36 PM
Greg, please consider supporting more than a local astrometry.net as a plate solver. The preferred solver these days is ASTAP (much better in terms of ease of installation, speed and overall capabilities) as well as PixInsight for imagers. I am an imager as well and have used both extensively. Years ago I did have a local astrometry.net installation as well and tried ANSVR, AstroTortilla and the like and while I'm grateful people have developed that software at the time, the world has moved on since that time.
In terms of licensing, I'm not a lawyer, but there are other commercial apps that integrate with multiple plate solvers, such as SharpCap Pro. Packaging a solver would indeed complicate matters, but integrating with a separate installation is preferred anyway (allowing for independent updates, particularly that some are updated very frequently) what those apps do. A lawyer or a conversation with the authors would clarify this anyway.
Phil, the integration of plate solving & the interactive atlas is at the core of what I was asking at https://skyhound.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=2177. In the meantime, ASTAP does annotate MPs as mentioned earlier in the thread; Tycho Tracker does as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0XhUAkK3R8).
Hope this helps,
Razvan
In terms of licensing, I'm not a lawyer, but there are other commercial apps that integrate with multiple plate solvers, such as SharpCap Pro. Packaging a solver would indeed complicate matters, but integrating with a separate installation is preferred anyway (allowing for independent updates, particularly that some are updated very frequently) what those apps do. A lawyer or a conversation with the authors would clarify this anyway.
Phil, the integration of plate solving & the interactive atlas is at the core of what I was asking at https://skyhound.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=2177. In the meantime, ASTAP does annotate MPs as mentioned earlier in the thread; Tycho Tracker does as well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0XhUAkK3R8).
Hope this helps,
Razvan