Troubleshooting

General approaches

To get some feedback on what is happening in your image, toggle the status panel at the lower right of the application. This provides a dynamically-updated view for some of the main processes (e.g., stacking, calibration, platesolving, capture).

Jocular creates log files that can be found in the logs subdirectory of your jocular data directory. These sometimes provide useful information in the case of problems arising.

Specific issues and possible solutions

  • The platesolver isn’t working.

    • Check that the image is flipped correctly.

    • Check that you have entered the scope’s focal length and the camera’s pixel height.

  • Jocular is not reacting to images placed in the watched folder

    • Do the FITS end up in the invalid directory of the watched folder? This may indicate an issue with the FITS files.

    • Do they get placed in the unused subdirectory of watched? In this case check that you are not inadvertently controlling the watched folder using Jocular’s capture button (set control using Jocular on the watched dir settings panel to off)

  • Jocular is interpreting my darks/flats as lights

    • Check the sub type option in the watched dir settings panel

  • Jocular is providing an incorrect exposure time

    • This most likely indicates that the capture program does not write exposure to the FITS. A fix is to set exposure to from user and supply the exposure manually on the main interface

    • Alternatively, the capture program might be using a FITS header for exposure that is non-standard. Use the above fix, but also contact me so that I can add this keyword to FITS-handling.

  • Jocular does not recognise the filter I’m using

    • See above, replacing exposure or sub type with filter.

  • The DSO planner shows incorrect altitude and azimuth for objects

    • have you entered your latitude and longitude (on the Observatory settings panel)?

  • My images are not being aligned

    • check the star-extraction settings on the aligner; the DoG method is slower but more robust, and setting bin image to 1 is also slower but more robust

  • Some of my previous observations are not showing up

    • click on rebuild observations in the previous observations table (and wait – it an take a while if you have a lot of observations)

  • Help! I deleted some previous observations or calibration files by mistake

    • Jocular doesn’t delete observations/calibration files but instead moves them to the deleted directory that you’ll find in joculardata. You will have to rename and move them back manually to the right place in either the captures directory structure or the calibration directory respectively.

  • Jocular is saving too many FITS and filling up my disk

    • From time to time, select the DSOs you want to delete in the previous observations table, hit move to delete dir, and then manually delete the contents of the deleted directory