I recently upgraded to kstars 3.5.4 stable and now I cannot plate-solve anymore.
I am using astrometry local on an astroberry and installed astrometry-data-2mass and astrometry-data-tycho for all the data files.
After exposing a frame and downloading it, I am able to platesolve that image doing:
$ solve-field name-of-frame.fits.
Unfortunately, I seem not to be able to get Ekos to solve that image. I enabled debugging infos for astrometry and plate-solving and are now able to see the invocation that is done for solve-field:
It looks something like this (I already modifies this one a bit, this is here so you can get the picture):
/usr/bin/solve-field -O --no-plots --no-verify --crpix-center --match none --corr none --new-fits none --rdls none --resort --odds-to-solve 1e+09 --odds-to-tune-up 1e+06 -L 1.47357 -H 2.21036 -u arcsecperpix -3 0.184083 -4 89.8773 -5 15 -v --backend-config /tmp/externalSextractorSolver_1.cfg --cancel /tmp/externalSextractorSolver_1.cancel -W /tmp/externalSextractorSolver_1.wcs --keep-xylist /tmp/externalSextractorSolver_1.xyls
Unfortunately with this, I am not able to reproduce the call and the configuration, as the /tmp/* files get deleted after the invocation. So I resorted to deleteing parameters and in the end, I was able to determine, that the given "-L 1.47357 -H 2.21036 -u arcsecperpix" seems to be the culprit. As you might have guessed, from a lot of user questions and advice you can glean from this forum, these have to do with pixel sizes and focal lengthes.
My Google-fu was not good enough to turn up a page, that explains, what I now need to enter as focal length and pixel sizes. If you give me a hand in this, I would appreciate that.
Here now are my requests:
- Could you make it so, that the invocation of solve-field can be copied verbatim and then be run on the command line, so one can reinvoke it?
- There are options to "ignore scale" and "ignore position", could you also provide a "ignore pixel size & focal length" configuration option? This would at best give some indication which settings to correct, to be able to invoke it next time with these options. I was not able to configure this from the forms that I looked at (see above).
- If and when the solver fails, could you just run solve-field with-out any of the optimization options, so that it would at least solve?
Judging from the entries in the forum, this seems to be one of biggest obstacles for people to get plate-solving to work. And personally it has cost me at least one of the precious clear sky nights, that we had.
Thanks, Grimaldi