Fabio Papa,  that makes a lot more sense.  I didn’t understand why you would be saying that blind solves were impossible when I know that they are and that was a major focus of my work last year.  You meant blind solves were not possible in Ekos’s load and slew function.  I do think this needs to be fixed in Ekos and Jasem said he will change that.

The Radius is only used when the position is given, so it doesn’t affect a blind solve.  That’s why it is in the profile, since it is not something you want to change regularly.  Basically you want it to use a radius if the position is close to accurate but if it is not known or if it is wrong, you probably don’t want to use position at all.  I would say if it is off by more than 15 degrees something is very wrong and a blind solve is needed.  Using a radius of 180 might work, but it has an equal chance of not working too.  Also I am not sure that a radius of 180 is much better than a blind solve.  15 is the default and has worked every time for me that I didn’t need a blind solve, if you prefer 180, you can change the profile on your machine.  It wasn’t my decision to use 15 degrees, that is the recommended number from the folks who made astrometry.net.

Another thing we have been discussing is that Ekos might want a fallback method for using a blind solve after an informed solve fails.  I think that would save a lot of people frustration and also having to turn off scale and position just to do a blind solve and then turn them back on later.

 

Read More...