Used to plate-solve just fine on my Mac; now it doesn't. Running it out of KStars 3.1.1 (i.e. I'm using what KStars installed, not a freestanding install). Signs & symptoms:
- Solving works fine for my ASI120MC-S
- Used to work for the 183MM, but on the Night of Disasters, it totally didn't
- Spins endlessly with "failed to solve" messages going by, times out after 3 minutes. Used to work in 5-30 seconds.
- I tried downloading some smaller-footprint index files, which may have been the issue. But removing them (I have autoindexing on) makes no diff.
- Turning up downsampling (e.g. from 2 to 16) makes no difference.
FOV with my SV70t-IS, FF/R, and 183MM is 125' x 84'; I have 4205 up through 4215 index files, and tried 4203 and 4204.
Lacking access to stars, I have been mucking around with Ekos's "Load and Slew" function, loading a previously-shot sub to solve. Same FITS files solve just fine at nova.astrometry.net, of course.
At one point, I thought I had it narrowed down to "working with visual filter, broken with Ha", which seemed like progress, even though I know for a fact that it worked fine through the Ha filter in the field. I wondered if the amp glow from the 183 was causing a problem, so I tried it with a dark-calibrated sub. Yay, it worked! Then it stopped working. I changed nothing -- honest! But now I can't solve a sub with the blue filter, the Ha, or the dark-calibrated Ha. It was literally "I'll run that again just to make sure" and it stopped solving.
Any ideas at all? Something broken with how the index files are set up? If so, how on earth would I fix that? If anyone has confronted a similar problem, I'd love to hear about it.
In my wackadoodle setup, the guidescope isn't collimated with the main, so having Ekos zero in on the target with the guidescope doesn't help me too much. But if I have to, I guess I'll collimate as best I can and calibrate the difference, then try manually nudging with the hand paddle.
BUT IT USED TO WORK!
Tia (sigh. AGAIN.)