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 (setcontrol 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
tofrom user
and supply the exposure manually on the main interfaceAlternatively, 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 settingbin 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 thecaptures
directory structure or thecalibration
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 thedeleted
directory