Hi Folks,

After my motherboard and handset blew and were replaced, I simultaneously (for other reasons) upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04.

Obviously this made everything much harder and since then I've been unable to solve. Obviously, the initial position needs to be within 30 degrees of the true position. In fact I relaxed that to 60 degrees, but with no joy.

Is there a sort of checklist for getting solve to work for the first time. Eg would it be better if I aligned with the handset first and then dropped back to solving automatically?

Astrometry works from the command line, because I've tried it, just not from KStars, although it seems to find and load lots of indices.

What should I do?

Kind regards

Steve.

Please check out the Alignment troubleshooting guide

Hi Stephen, I noticed that the default paths for the indices had changed when upgrading from ubuntu 20 ro 22.
It used to see it in /usr/share/astrometry.
Set a link (or copy it) so that it appears under .local/share/kstars/astrometry under your home directory.
You should see some debug output that may indicate.

Nice, I'll look at that. When I started all of this I wrote my own interface to astrometry with Python, and it worked OK, but not fast. I'm not sure what version of KStars I was using under 20.04, but the solving was so much faster with it than my own hand-rolled version. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how this newer solve works, when I can get it working.

I have been using Kstars 3.5.8 as I was having several issues with the latest 3.6.x.
This uses Stellasolver and is very fast (typically a few seconds).
Also check you have the correct focal length set, otherwise it may start a blind solve and give up.

I have my index files still in /usr/share/astrometry and it works fine so that should not be a issue.