ELBRUS: THREE STARS CALIBRATING TUTORIAL
Introduction
Do I need this calibration tutorial ?
Step by step calibration
Now I can solve my images
INTRODUCTION
The most dificult point for new Elbrus users is to calibrate. This is an attempt to help you. It will be very frustrating if you really need Elbrus but you can't use it. So if, despite this tutorial, you still have problems, don't hesitate. Send a mail to the yahoo group StarLocatorElbrus. Everybody there is ready to help you.
Elbrus works by comparing the stars in your image to the database.
So the first thing you must have is a set of stars extracted from your image. If Elbrus is not able to extract stars it can do nothing more, and it stops searching.
Elbrus searches angular star distances, so it must know how big are your pixels in arcseconds.
In order to do the job faster, the orientation of the image is needed, we call it the image angle. It tells us where is the North direction in your images. And to furthermore accelerate the search, we need to know where is the East (or West) relative to the North. This is given by the "reversed image" concept.
So we are going to learn:
==how to compute the calibration parameters:
-- 'pixel-size',
-- 'image-angle' and
-- 'image reversed'
for your scope-camera configuration,
==how to apply all this in solving images.
But first we must answer the question:
Do I need this calibration tutorial ?
1.- Run Elbrus, go to the File menu, then to 'A-Image path...' and select your image.(Updated February 10, 2009 Alfonso Pulido)