I still have astrometry issues, even on KStars 2.8.7 for OS X. I downloaded almost all FITS files from the astrometry.net website about two weeks ago. Furthermore I uninstalled the homebrew astrometry.net. When I take an image with my DSLR camera then astrometry fails to resolve the image. This, by the way, also happens on Linux, where I am using kstars bleeding where it worked fine until a few weeks ago. Sorry for not reporting this sooner but I have been travelling a lot.

I attach the "verbose" logging but I am afraid they are not very verbose at all. Any clue?

According to your log it fails immediately which means it is probably a configuration issue which makes astrometry fail to start solving.

In the align tab in Ekos, Astrometry options, does it look like this:



And if you click the index files tab, does it have index files checked off like this:



And finally for the solver options, does it look like this?

The first screen looks slightly different where the WCS, Verbose and Overlay checkboxes are not ticked. The other screens look the same, except that in my case nearly all index files have check boxes. I'll try to tick the checkboxes in the first screen and see if that helps. Thanks!

Thanks, that helped but the problem hasn't gone away completely. See the attached log. Any other ideas?

Any idea what's the astrometry.net version? It doesn't show in the log when it's suppose to.

It is using the internal one. The homebrew version I had was 0.72 but I uninstalled that.

Ok can you try this in the command line and see what is printed out?

First open a terminal window in OS X. Then type the following and hit enter:

export PATH=/Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/netpbm/bin:/Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/python/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin

Then. you need to try to plate solve an image. Then you will see the command that it tried down at the bottom of the Align Tab in Ekos. Based on your log, your last command that didn't work was this:

/Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/astrometry/bin/solve-field -O --no-plots --no-verify --resort --downsample 2 -L 124.493 -H 206.158 -u aw -3 91.1501 -4 90 -5 30 --config /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/astrometry/bin/astrometry.cfg -W /var/folders/jr/tcfsd52s5836dvkzvrk79bgw0000gp/T/solution.wcs /var/folders/jr/tcfsd52s5836dvkzvrk79bgw0000gp/T/fitsjKM950

Of course that exact command is now probably invalid because the image is gone now, but basically you should try to find that complete command verbatim and copy and paste it from the log, or drag it from the Ekos window into the terminal. Then hit enter and see what happens.

If it solves the image just fine, then I suspect you might have some things left in /usr/local/bin like python without pyfits or something like that. Or maybe in the system files. If you will note I specifically removed /usr/local/bin from the PATH variable to force it to use the python and netpbm from the app. If it doesn't work, then lets see what prints out.

just to make sure, the export PATH=blah blah is all in the same line, the forum makes it look like 2 lines.

Wait I just noticed something in your command, are you plate solving near the pole? Because that doesn't work too well in astrometry.net.

First of all, the directories /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/netpbm/bin and /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/python/bin don't exist on my system!

$> ll /Applications/kstars.app/Contents/MacOS/
total 18448
drwxr-xr-x@ 4 wreeven admin 128 Oct 31 06:41 astrometry/
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 wreeven admin 190536 Oct 31 06:43 dbus-daemon*
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 wreeven admin 25700 Oct 31 06:41 dbus-send*
drwxr-xr-x@ 132 wreeven admin 4224 Oct 31 06:40 indi/
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 wreeven admin 20144 Oct 31 06:43 kioslave*
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 wreeven admin 9203656 Oct 31 06:43 kstars*
drwxr-xr-x@ 4 wreeven admin 128 Oct 31 06:41 xplanet/

So it looks like something is wrong with my installation. I'll install again.

Secondly, plate solving near the pole really works well. Or at least it used to. And it is needed for the polar alignment module which I have used a lot until a few weeks ago...

I downloaded kstars from

edu.kde.org/kstars/#download

Is that the correct location? Because the indilib.org download location at

indilib.org/download/osx.html

seems to have an old version of kstars. And CloudMakers only seem to host downloads for indi. Or do I need to combine downloads from several sources?

Oh that could explain your problem then! Those directories need to be in there.

Maybe its just near the pole in the simulators that plate solving near the pole doesn't work too well, but I usually just don't do it too close to 90 anyway.