PinPoint 6.1 Release Notes
This minor release moves PinPoint onto a later Microsoft C++/COM platform that, along with a couple of optimizations made possible bythis move, results in a dramatic (2X or more) solving speed increase. In addition, some minor tweaks were made to allow PinPoint to use a local all-sky engine, eliminating the need for an internet connection (at the cost of significant disk space and installation effort).
What's New in 6.1?
- Solving speed has been more than doubled for most images. This was made possible by recent improvements in Microsoft C++ compiler and library technology, and some new code improvements made possible by same.
- Local all-sky plate solving is now supported via Andy Galasso's ansvr package, a windows installable local version of Astrometry.net and a tiny webserver that acts like Astrometry.net. It's up to you to download, install and set up this package, and to download the indexes you need for your largest and smallest field of view. Details are described in All-Sky Plate Solving.
What's Changed in 6.1?
- Visual PinPoint no longer needs approximate coordinates in the FITS header for all-sky solving.
- Documentation on all-sky solving now has a prominent note that the timeout is 10 minutes. This should help those that give up too quickly then report a bug.
- All-Sky solving will work on systems with ',' decimal point now.
- The engine has been fixed for a very subtle and rare edge condition in the aperture photometry detector/centroider.
- All-Sky solving does a better (more complete) job of reporting errors. There are many possibilities and several classes of these errors were not being reported properly.
- The license entry applet now uses a calendar control to minimize date entry problems, and it has a link to the online store.
- Plate solving old plates like the DSS has been fixed. Previously DATE-OBS before 1/1/1970 would fail due to use of Unix date functions.
- The centroid selector radiobuttons are all lettered in black now. The gray lettering looked like they were disabled.
- The documentation for Plate.RemoveHotPixels() now makes it clear that ImageStars collections are invalidated.
- Blanks in license fields are now stripped before saving for later validation.
- The link to the catalog information on the web has been updated to point to the article on the DC-3 Dreams Communication Center.
- Documentation for Plate.MaxSolveTime now gives the proper default value of 60 seconds.
- Reading of the DATE-OBS field in FITS and converting to the OLE Date/Time for the Plate.ExposureStartTime property has been corrected to prevent a possible 1 millisecond error due to truncation instead of rounding.
- The installer is now smarter about the presence of ACP and will refuse to run with ACP installed. It looks for the ACP.exe and not the registry info so uninstalling ACP (possibly an evaluation version) will allow the installer to run and install standalone PinPoint.
- The Yes button on the the "old PinPoint license" popup in the installer now leads to the correct place on the online store.
- Old PinPoint licenses on systems with MaxIm (which may have installed a newer engine that would ordinarily be prohibited with that old of a license) are now limited to 5 years "grace period".
PinPoint 6.0 Release Notes
PinPoint 6 is a major release incorporating all-sky plate solving with Astrometry.net, support for the UCAC4 catalog, plus new API calls, speed and reliability improvements, and of course bug fixes.
Critical Info for Programmers:
The following info may benefit the PinPoint usage in your program:
- In order to prevent false solutions, the plate scales (Plate.ArcserPerPixelHoriz and Plate.ArcSecPerPixelVert) must now be set to a value within the range of 75% to 125% of the actual plate scale of the image. If the solution calculates a plate scale outside this range, it will be rejected by the engine. There are no limits to the rotation angle.
- You can almost always use the new Plate.RemoveHotPixels() method before calling Plate.FindImageStars() or Plate.Solve (without Plate.FindImageStars() beforehand) to improve the chances of a successful solution. Often times, hot pixel removal will greatly improve solution reliability!
- The Point Spread Function (PSF fit) detector has been improved to the point where it is comparable in sensitivity to the (default) aperture photometry detector. You should probably use this (Plate.CentroidAlgorithm = ppPSF) in preference to the default detector. Start with Plate.SigmaAboveMean at 2.0. Do not run the Plate.ConvolveGaussian() filter with the PDF detector. It actually hurts its ability to detect.
- To take advantage of the all-sky solving capability, you have to specifically call Plate.SolveAllSky(). An internet connection is required.
- The Plate.MinimumBrightness property has been deprecated. Do not set it. The default value of zero is fine. It des not affect the operation of the (now recommended) PSF fit detector.
What's New in 6.0?
- All-sky plate solving using the Astrometry.net internet solving service. This includes several PinPoint API additions including Plate.SolveAllSky().
- The solver has been made more resistant to false solutions. They were rare, they should now be unheard-of. The result is that some sketchy correct solutions will no longer solve.
- Support for the USNO UCAC4 reference star catalog has been added to the PinPoint engine, Visual PinPoint, and the Catalog Checker.
- A new method Plate.RemoveWCS() has been added. This removes all traces of WCS and distortion polynomial coefficients from the FITS header.
- A new method Plate.RemoveHotPixels() has been added. This can dramatically help plate solutions by eliminating single "outlier" hot pixels.
- Visual PinPoint now has hot pixel removal options for all image scanners.
- Three new properties PlateStar.JMagnitude, PlateStar.HMagnitude, and PlateStar.KMagnitude have been added. These extended Johnson infrared magnitudes are available for stars retrieved from the USNO B1.0, UCAC3, and UCAC4 catalogs.
- Three new values for the Plate.FilterBand enumeration have been added, corresponding to the new JHK magnitude bands. If an image taken in one of these new color bands, and Plate.ColorBand is set to the band's enumerated value, and if the catalog used contains magnitudes in this band, the in-band magnitudes for all stars in the image will be estimated and will be available in the coorresponding PlateStar magnitude property..
- A new event Plate.SolveStatus has been implemented. This allows the engine to inform clients with text messages regarding the progress of solving (including All-Sky solving).
- Visual PinPoint now allows up to 4 characters for the temporary designation prefix used for MPC reports.
- The hex counter used in Visual PinPoint for MPC temporary designations is now saved persistently across runs, and automatically resets when it exceeds the value that would cause the prefix to be longer than 7 characters. This will happen depending on the length of the prefix that the user sets.
- The CLRBAND field in the FITS header will no longer be included unless the Plate.ColorBand property is set via the API or upon attachment of a plate which already has CLRBAND in the FITS header. As a result of this change, the Plate.FilterBand enumeration now contains a new member ppUnfiltered.
- The Email field in the MPC contact info of Visual PinPoint now assures that the required brackets are present. It was done this way to provide compatibility with previous versions of the program.
What's Changed in 6.0?
- The PSF detector has been improved again. It is now at least as good as the aperture photometry detector. Going forward you should consider using Plate.CentroidAlgorithm = ppPSF and set the Plate.SigmaAboveMean to 2.0 as a starting point. Combined with the new Plate.RemoveHotPixels() method, the number of matching stars can be increased substantially.
- Visual PinPoint now defaults to using the PSF detector and Sigma at 2.0 (for that detector).
- Description of the .stars detection file in Plate.CacheImageStars property documentation has been fixed to include the FWHM field.
- The plate scales (Plate.ArcserPerPixelHoriz and Plate.ArcSecPerPixelVert) must now be set to a value within the range of 75% to 125% of the actual plate scale of the image.
- The USNO B1.0 catalog was omitting most stars below -33 dec. This was due to these stars having no valid "B1" magnitudes. The B1.0 catalog no longer requires B1 mag on stars to be usable in PinPoint. The magnitude filtering now uses R1 magnitude (which is required for all stars). B1.0 no linger reports the phoney C magnitude. It will report a B and V magnitude, but only if the B1 magnitude is available for that star.
- Several missing messages were added to the API documentation
- The FWHM property is no longer a preposterous value when stars are read from a cache (.stars) file.
- Some of the failure messages for plate solving have been made more user-friendly
- A long standing bug has been fixed where "the specified resource name cannot be found" was reported instead of the correct error message.
- The deprecated Min Flux (Plate.MinimumBrightness) settings in Visual PinPoint are gone.
- Several problems with Visual PinPoint plate solving and projection types otgher than TAN have been fixed.
- The sample images have been moved to My Documents\PinPoint Sample Images and the documentation updated to reflect that change.
- Documenation has been provided on how to use Pinpoint to look up reference stars without needing a real FITS image (see Plate.FindCatalogStars())
- The (experimental) trailed-star fitting logic has been removed from Visual PinPoint.
- The usage of the Force Image Rescan option for solving and searching is now explained in detail.
- Visual PinPoint now correctly includes NET UCAC3 (or now UCAC4 if used) in its MPC reports
- Visual PinPoint no longer exits with a run time error if there are no detected stars in image
- The documentation was brought up to date in many places. This was a large project (and there probably are additional fossil items in the docs, huge as they are).
Copyright © 1999-2015, Robert B. Denny, Mesa, AZ