@MountainAir,
I'm sorry you had issues with this, and I agree with you that:
- Several of the modules are sensitive to the values in the StellarSolver profiles (focus, SEP guiding, align)
- There could be better documentation about how to adjust these (though Rob did provide links to SEP documentation in the blue links above the parameters)
I will say that the guide default parameters, which were my best guess, work well for me and my 105mm refractor with an OAG, and for several other Ekos users--but clearly they don't work for your setups.
My ideal would be that folks learn how to tweak these StellarSolver profiles and post their working profiles, or at least what they changed to make them work, along with their equipment, so that we could all learn how to adjust them. I think some sort of FAQ or WiKi would be best for this type of thing, but perhaps a dedicated forum thread on StellarSolver profiles. There are several threads on this forum which boil down to some issue configuring StellarSolver profiles. On the other hand, when configured properly, the star extraction and align code in StellarSolver work very well.
Before StellarSolver, there was one internal "profile" or way of configuring the SEP star extraction code, and either it worked or didn't work for your equipment (note that "Smart" guiding does not use SEP star extraction, but rather it's own extraction scheme). Now, Rob has provided a way for users to get things to work for many different kinds of equipment. Unfortunately, it's complicated, and no one is an expert on configuring this yet.
Hy