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kstars and astrometry on mac

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I am trying to get all my resources on a pi (success) and on my mac as well. All of the features work except astrometry. i keep getting an error about the location of files, but cannot seem to find where they really are or should be. Any help appreciated.
6 years 2 weeks ago #24130

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The Astrometry index files should be in ~/Library/Application Support/Astrometry. There is a download feature built into the Mac version of kstars so you can download the ones you need by just clicking a button.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jack Fitzmier
6 years 2 weeks ago #24131

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Thanks so much. I have checked and the files are in the proper place. When I start the profile now, no errors. But if I slew to a star, and do a capture and solve, or if I load a fits file and use load and slew, the solver works and then fails. Any further advice much appreciated!

Jack
6 years 1 week ago #24197

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There are a lot of reasons why it might fail to solve, there are a number of settings that you need to adjust in the options of the Align module to get it to solve well. They need to be tweaked until it solves quickly. In order to help you, I would need to know more about your current settings.
6 years 1 week ago #24198

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Thanks ... do these help?

Jack
6 years 1 week ago #24199

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Yes,

First one really important question. Does it fail immediately, or does it try to solve for a good while and then fail? Because you didn't post any output, I don't know what it does. If it fails immediately, that usually means there is something wrong with your astrometry server or you gave it an incorrect option (like having -nofits2fits wrong). If it takes time but just doesn't solve, look at my recommendations below.

Now, based on what I see in your images, some small recommendations:
1. turn on Verbose mode so that you can see what it is doing when it is trying to solve if you are having trouble.
2. I would definitely take more than a 1 second exposure, but not much longer. I usually do maybe 4 - 20 seconds. It depends on how many stars you get
3. it says your field size is 25 arc minutes. I would recommend definitely including index files 4208, 4108, 4207, 4107.
4. You included the really really small index files like 4200 and 4201. I do understand that your field size is small, so you might need some of them, but they are enormous. Including them might help but it might also slow things down a lot. Try solving a sample image or two with your setup on nova.astrometry.net. See which files it tends to use to solve. If it doesn't need 4200, definitely get rid of it. The same goes for the other small numbers.
5. Check to make sure your focal length and aperture information is entered correctly in the mount module.
6. If it still doesn't solve after doing these things, try unchecking "use scale" or "use position." See if it solves. Your scale or position could be off.
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jasem Mutlaq
6 years 1 week ago #24200

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Thanks again for your assistance. Much appreciated. I decided to start all over. I deleted all of the kstars files and downloaded the latest version and installed it. Had some good success yesterday just using astrometry, the ccd simulator, and the telescope simulator. Some solutions were relatively quick; others took longer; some failed. I took your suggestions and increased the exposure and played with the scale and position checkboxes. Today, however, it appears to be funky again. The profile loads but I get this error: "Failed to find astrometry.net binaries. Please ensure astrometry.net is installed and try again." I have checked everyplace I know and do not understand what is going on. Probably some simple thing, but having seen how it works I am eager to get it working again. Thoughts?
6 years 1 week ago #24281

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Double check in the options that the checkboxes for using the internal solvers are checked.

Also, a different person recently had an issue after he deleted his KStars data folder but did not empty the trash and somehow it thought the data folder was still there and so did not install properly. So maybe empty the trash?
The following user(s) said Thank You: Jack Fitzmier
6 years 1 week ago #24284

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