Hi,
I've spent the evening attempting to get plate solving working. Unfortunately I have been unable to succeed.
My system:
QHY9 ccd /CFW2 filter wheel
Moonlight focuser
QHY 5L2 guider
AZEQ6 using Indi Eqmod driver

Exact geographical settings were entered in both Kstars and Eqmod.
Correct focal lengths and pixel sizes and scales were entered.
No matter how I tried, whether local or on line, I was unable to achieve a plate solve.

At the end of the night I found that Kstars has the wrong daylight saving time rules - it says Australian DST starts on the last Sunday in October, when it actually started on the first Sunday in October. Since my laptop was set to the correct DST could this have affected the plate solving?

Are there any settings I should check to get plate solving to work? Itried blind solving with nothing entered in the radius, I also tried a number of values for this ranging from 5 through to 60.

Help appreciated....

cheers
Gary

What were the plate solve options? Turn on verbose log for astrometry.net (in KStars settings --> Ekos). Did you try solving from the command line using the same parameters? Post a link to the image you were trying to solve

Hi,
I don't have an image to upload - I was trying to align my mount as you had shown in your video (a couple of years old), take a pic, automatically upload and solve.

Options were:
Mode Goto
Goto mode Slew to Target
Accuracy 30
Settle 1500
Exposures 2,5, 10, 20, 30, 60 seconds all tried
Ra and dec copied, radius 30
blind solve tried with ra and dec coords cleared and radius left empty
binnig 1x1 x2 and 4x 4 all tried
Pixel size 5.4 microns - QHY9
Options - defaults --no-verify --no-plots --no-fits2fits --resort --downsample 2 -O -L 19.3223 -H 26.6952 -u aw
Focal length 2100mm
Solver tried both Online and Offline

Dont know how to solve from command line
Clouds have come in so can't activate logs..

cheers
Gary

The FOV limits sound a bit off. What is the Width & Height reported by QHY9? What is the pixel size are reported by QHY9 driver in the "Image Info" tab in QHY9 INDI COntrol panel?

Hi Jasem,

will take a few days to get this info - had a major wind storm here (120km/hour plus winds - 1 person dead, 100,000 homes without power). Have had some observatory damage - nearly lost the roof, and some damage to repair before I can fire things up and check the info. Will probably 3 or 4 days before I can get back to you.
cheers
Gary

Hey gmck,
With such winds, 3-4 days to recover seems very fortunate. Be safe.
I'll share my own experience of the plate solver. I'm still struggling to make it work on my side.
I suggest you capture a preview of the picture, and use the anonymous upload API at nova.astrometry.net to try to solve (instead of the "online" option, which will give you zero feedback). If successful (and that's already an information), this will give you the expected position and field size. Note that the online astrometry.net algorithm doesn't use the same catalog as the installable offline mode, or the remote mode.
To me because the solver looks up the position 30 degrees around the argument one, DST shouldn't be an issue.
As a side note, I got faster and more consistent results once I provided a precise arcsec/pixel resolution to solve-field, with an added speed bonus when knowing the "parity" option in advance.
-Eric

What are the differences between the astrometry.net options generated from KStars and the ones by astrometry.net website? if there are issues with the options generation, I should address it.

I'm totally new to this part, just started digging into it this month. I'd be very presumptuous to say there is a problem with the options generation...
I'm probably not able to verify arguments -L/-H computed from the telescope and ccd variables because I don't know the maths. But I know the scale boundaries in arcsec/pixel of the ccd+telescope setup from successfully solving a picture on nova.astrometry.net. Thus right now I tend to replace the options with that calibration.
The other thing is that nova.astrometry.net will search a scale from 0 to 180 degrees, with a downsample of 2, and that's all, probably because they have a relatively strong host behind. If the telescope/ccd parameters are not filled in correctly in Ekos, or if something on the optical path is not taken into account, the optimization in the arguments will probably drop the actual solution.
And finally, nova.astrometry.net will search in the index list called the 200-series (see for instance groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/astrometry/RfpNop2fTV8). The offline and remote solvers will use what is called the 4200-series. Right now I don't recall which star catalog gives which series.
I have no numerical example at hand to go with this post unfortunately. I'll work out one as soon as possible.
-Eric

Hi,
now have everything working again.

Have decided to give up on Raspberry Pi - could not get plate solving working and found it would not connect to my equipment reliably.

Switched to my Linux Mint laptop and everything except my Moonlight Focuser works beautifully - including plate solving!

Will start a new thread later on the Moonlight Focuser issues.

cheers
Gary