Thank you for your answer.

(1) "The -O option is required in Ekos since the -o option overwrites the previous solution files and if that were not included"

-> what I meant is that when I open the "edit solver options" the checkbox for the -O is not cheked, yet the option appears in the option line. This is odd and I was wondering if this is to be expected, maybe some kind of refresh needs to happen ?

(2) "Astrometry.net has lots of capabilities and options, no Ekos does not have all of them built in as checkboxes but they can still be used"

-> that is nice to know While I was poking around I noticed that the infobox on the "custom" field in the Solver options says : "additional optional astrometry.net options" so that settles it

I have to say that the more I learn about Ekos/Kstars the more impressed I am ... I think I am a bit of pain in the b**t by asking so many pointed questions but I need to know a lot of the details as I will train some club members on it in a couple of weeks and I'm sure I will be bombarded with the same kind of questions...

Thank you for taking the time to reply !

@gbeaton, @rlancaste

I am also seeing that PAA never completes. It takes the 3rd image, completes the solve, then just hangs there with the 'Capture' button greyed out. Or the entire KStars will crash sometimes. I see this with the CCD simulator and telescope simulator, so not a driver issue.

I reported this here .

Meanwhile, the regular Capture and Solve works fine, with the Sync action, all that works fine.

PAA was working fine until around the 4th of July or so.

Also, I see the same thing regarding WCS: if I disable WCS in the solver options and in INDI, but still the code tries to do it, and the code crashes in a method called loadWCS, which points to where the issue may lie.

The -O option is supposed to be a disabled checkbox that is permanently checked. That one and the noplots option. Is it not that way on your system? I can take a look and see if that was changed recently. You should not be able to uncheck it.

Yes, Jasem made a change to wcs so that it does not always load when an image is loaded, but instead is loaded when needed. This also broke a couple of the methods that I had written, but I have since corrected them. I dont have much experience with the polar alignment helper, maybe Jasem can help.

The problem is now resolved in KStars GIT.

I am no dev and this could be completely irrelevant but it would be a shame not to report this if in the end it was relevant ...

So I was looking at Astrometry GitHb and saw that the release 0.67 (which is the current one I get from the ppa) has this note attached:

@dstndstn dstndstn released this on 25 Jan 2016 · 279 commits to master since this release
only minor changes since 0.66; tagging this release to pick up new python API calls for WCS parsing from fitsio headers.

github.com/dstndstn/astrometry.net/releases

I could not help notice that it mentions WCS so ... Please humour me, maybe it is nothing but I thougth I should raise a flag.

Great news!

I eagerly await the next release - thanks!

Does kstars-bleeding 5:17.04+201707072129~ubuntu17.04.1 have this fix or will it come through in a day or two?

No.

It has to be a future release dated after 2017-07-13.

In a couple of days with 2.7.10 release

201707072129 worked OK for me last night. I was able to plate solve for polar alignment and setting the sky model working offline.

looks like the build isn't ready for the Mac yet.