rather odd, I had my equipment out last night to try to shoot Jupiter, and what was working a couple of weeks ago wasn't working. I have a ASI 120MM Mini on a 60mm f/4 refractor, and job number one was to plate solve to sync to the desired bit of sky I wanted to point at. But I consistently had Ekos telling me "insufficient stars" being reported although it appeared to have plenty. I tried playing with exposures, gain, binning, and focus but other than a couple of solves that magically happened, I was unable to get consistent plate solves.
oh, I tried to turn on logging as suggested in the "insufficient stars" message but the message but I couldn't figure out exactly what it meant about turning on logging; when I checked the logs window it looked like I had logging on, I switched between various logging verbosity settings but no new log folders were created when failing to plate solve - so either it was on and not logging, or the instructions provided to turn logging on were inadequate
what strategy should I use to troubleshoot this and figure out how to get it working?
I'd recommend you install KStars beta and try it out. The beta is supposed to be stable in less than two weeks, so we'd appreciate any feedback if this problem still exists. "Insufficient stars" is a generic message that I put in there when the solver fails.
Hi - I'm a noob but an getting the same message 'in the wild'. My images solve fine in ASTAP but no matter what options in EKOS i'm getting nothing. I will try KStars beta.
I'm also unable to select ASTAP as plate solver in EKOS options - have entered the correct path to the binary but nothing happens .. appreciate this could be offtopic.
I usually run with ASTAP, and have screenshot my align options below.
If you're like me and your ASTAP is installed in /opt/astap, you should make sure the binary and all the support files are there.
Insufficient stars usually means that the star-detection component isn't finding any stars (so would be fixed by adjusting StellarSolver parameters),
however, if you are using ASTAP, then Ekos doesn't run star detection--I believe that's all done inside the ASTAP binary.
So, you should not be seeing that message if you have configured it to use ASTAP.
When my solver reported "insufficient stars" recently, I was sitting in front of a new set up computer and stellarsolver wasn't installed at all. It took me a while to figure it out!