By the way... I always bring with me a clean copy of my working SD card when I'm in the field. It helps saving the day sometimes I just have to swap the cards in case of emergency and I can perform the autopsy once home

- Marc

PS : Actually, I also bring a second Pi. You're never too prudent when your night relies on this little buddy.

INDI server does not have a GUI, it is headless as is.

So you can either install Debian or Ubuntu server on the Pi, and just install INDI server there. Or if you want to use GUI-OS like StellarMate, you can do as Marc suggested above which is to set the run level to 3 to prevent going to GUI mode. Btw, SM OS already forces fsck on boot if it detects issues. What version were you running?

Please note that this problem has nothing to do with 'desktop' or 'gui'. So especially the answers suggesting to switch to runlevel 3 / text mode won't help anything, you'd run into the same error again as it happens way before any desktop environment is started.
It is the initial system startup script that would (try to) run the file system check. And usually, it does this with the option '-y' to run unattended (for filesystems that support this).
As Jasem mentioned, the automatic fsck is already done in SM, so it might well be that in your case you did hit an error that fsck could not fix. Then of course (also) a headless system is at the loss (unless it has something like automatic restore from a separate partition).

I'd just always carry a second SD card with a backup with me.....

Derpit wrote : "... so it might well be that in your case you did hit an error that fsck could not fix."

Right, but considering Ubuntu has most probably a journaling filesystem, this shoud not even happen and a power loss shouldn't do much damage... Those days when a power loss on Unices systems was a catastrophe are long gone . If fsck could not fix the problem, maybe it's because the card itself has been corrupted ?

- Marc

I am new to Stellarmate, but wouldn't starting RealVNC on your laptop create the opportunity to work on the Pi as it were?
I always run RealVNC next to Kstars on my laptop just to start other programs on my Pi....
Cheers

But perhaps VNC is not running on the Pi in the situation you mention?

Yes, it happens before the VNC service starts.

Out of curiosity, how do you shutdown the Pi without VNC?
Is it possible from Kstars on your laptop?

I do that either with VNC or through Stellarmate's Web interface.

Most of the time I just pull the plug and so far (2+ years) never had a problem.

from a simple terminal something a bit less violent maybe
ssh -t yourPi poweroff
- Marc

It's built on Ubuntu right? You should be able to edit /etc/defaults/rcS
And edit/add the line: FSCKFIX=yes

From the man page -- man5/rcS.5.html
FSCKFIX
When the root and all other file systems are checked, fsck is invoked with the -a
option which means "autorepair". If there are major inconsistencies then the fsck
process will bail out. The system will print a message asking the administrator to
repair the file system manually and will present a root shell prompt (actually a
sulogin prompt) on the console. Setting this option to yes causes the fsck
commands to be run with the -y option instead of the -a option. This will tell
fsck always to repair the file systems without asking for permission.