Displaying images/sky survey images

[theskyhound]

Hi,
The fastest way I have found was to download ad hoc images from Astrobin and add them to the objects.
It would be pretty big job for Greg to include this feature and would require getting proper authorizations for any third party image so I can understand this is not a priority.

You can add any plate solved image for display in the chart backgrounds. Click "Data" in the top level menu and open the "Plottable Images". This opens the Plottable Images Manager. To add an image that has been plate solved click Import Image.

It helps to understand how Attachments in SkyTools work. People seem to just skip that stuff, but its all there in the Help system. Its just a folder where you organize things. For example, you could put all of the images for a project into an attachments folder for that project.

I was going to add plate solving into SkyTools using an external call to ASTAP but I couldn't get ASTAP to solve a lot of my images. It just gives up. This drives me crazy when so much inf is already in the FITS header, such as the RA/Dec of the center of the image. I'll never understand why these plate solvers don't start with that info. Anyhow, when I looked for possible solutions I just found others with the same complaint. If anyone knows how to make ASTAP solve images more reliably, let me know.