like ALL platesolving having the correct parameters help.

If you have trouble start ASTAP as stand alone and load the image.

Click the "stack" menu so the Stack window appears.

Choose Alignment tab is not already selected.

Set the correct FOV height - it should set this automatically after a sucessful solve - if not or its not working use Astrometry.net upload to get the correct value or set Auto (but this takes a long time first time)

Use the Down sampling and Max stars to maximise speed but setting a too small a value will cause Platesolving to fail on occasions. suggest default 500 stars and auto for first run - but it will change depending on the image - as with ALL Platesolving

Tick "calibrate prior solving" - this will help with "noisey" images

Obviously "blind solving" will take longer so for testing set the RA,dec of the object so that platesolving is "near" not "blind" - do this via the RA/Dec on the first Window by double clicking the mouse in either Dec or RA area. And yes I didn't know what the signs were - Come on Hans it should be for all not just experts in Greek

As you can see times vary but it can vbe very fast 2.3 secs to 106+ for blind solving - on my example I used m81 via double click object name for M31 and it rook 106secs on images that were not great.

If all else fails post image to Hans he will help after reading the manual - which of course we all read dont we LOL

ASTAP is the only Platesolver,I know of, to work across the board natively on Windows,Linux and MacOS and doesn't require index's to be loaded per FOV.

But I admit it can be "fussy" - but the latest version can do "slow" plateslving (tick box) for most images that it didm't solve before.

Read More...