Follow minor planet - or comet

[einari]

I'm assuming asteroid or comet align assumes that north is up (and east west) in images.
How about when camera is not rotated like that ?
Would it be possible to read angle from fits and then calculate the angle of asteroid/comet based on that ?

[fabdev]

Hello,
you need to carefully measure the rotation angle and pixel scale: do a plate solve, then open Statistics, note the Angle in "Field of view" line and the Pixel Scale.

These values must be set in the Observer/Camera settings.

[einari]

I tried but it doesn' t look much better.
Is negative camera angle valid ?

[fabdev]

Yes of course.
If you calculate the comet speed and angle with Astroart (the "Find" button) remember to have an updated CometEls.txt file, in any case you may check with the MPC values. If the comet is close to Earth, verify that the observatory coordinates are correct.

[einari]

Back to this.

Today I made a macro to rotate all comet files so they would be north/south.
And now the follow minor planet aligning worked.