Hi All, I have an odd question. Whenever I plate solve for the first time of the night, it's always way off. ...like 60,500 arcsecs off, and its always off to the south. Its fairly consistent too. Pretty much around the same amount every night. After I let it solve and adjust, its fine for the rest of the night. When I PA I'm always pretty close, within a few arcsecs off so I'm ok with that. So I'm not sure where the issue is. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Mike

Is this after you just started up the mount? As in before you do any alignment? I would expect the first plate solve to be pretty far off that very first time if you are doing plate solving to align your telescope mount because that is why we do alignment in the first place, because the mount has some idea of its orientation when you turn it on, but it isn't that good until you calibrate/align it. If you mean that you did a 3 star alignment first and then you plate solved, that would be much more surprising since I would expect it to be pretty well aligned at that point. If you mean you are doing a warm start not a cold start, then that would also be more surprising since the mount should remember its position pretty well (but not perfectly).

yes, after a cold startup and with no alignment at all. just power up, point it at something and do a plate solve. so this is normal under these circumstances? if so, I'm good with it. Like I said, once I do the plate solve, its good for the rest of the night.

Oh yes absolutely normal. Even if you did the 3 star alignment, the very first star would be possibly in a telrad or a finder scope, but almost certainly would not be in an eyepiece or a camera. By the 3rd star in the alignment, it will be in the eyepiece, but not at the start.

This is something that is hitting me right now. Last night did an apt-get upgrade and a LOT of new stuff came in on the RPi and the entire interface was different after a restart (prior to that everything was working fine). I even had issues with my setup for my "optical train" apparently not migrating over, and I could not delete the #1 position and had to create new ones.

I have a William Optics EQ-35 (rebadged EQ-35 Pro) and after doing an alignment via the hand controller (apparently a requirement with my system since if I don't align it the mount won't connect via EKOS, it telling to do an alignment) my plate solving is WAY off every time.. by 400-500K arc seconds according to what I saw.



I went so far as to do a fresh install of SM and then immediately do an update before even starting EKOS/INDI, then reconfigured everything fresh - while that was doing, I had my other RPi hooked up that was running an older version to the mount/scope and it was working fine.

Took the updated one out and get the same issue...along with some others that I will make a new thread about as it kills the way I have to do my 3 star alignment using image captures looping.
It's almost like the alignment is not pulling the scope location... I know that our designator uses a - since we are West... but it doesn't show up in the long/lat as a negative, just a positive...but that might be a dispaly "error"?
These are what concern me the most, and makes me think where the issue lay (this was with the SynScan controller having the right data put in and KStars geographic location changed to my locale).






The weird thing... KStars can be told an object and successfully tracks to it (albeit not exactly centered since I cannot get an alignment done.
And the another weird thing.... it shows trying to capture/slew but the mount never moves.

An update... I changed the binning of my ASI533MM Pro from 2x2 to 1x1 and it seemed to solve now... but I'm still getting random reboots.

And to top off more weirdness... after changing to 1x1 binning, I went back to try 2x2 binning and it worked this time.

EDIT:

And now, after a restart of INDI/EKOS/KStars... it's back to happening again and changing the binning does NOT help this time.

EDIT:
But this time, loading a FITS in after I had used KStars to already go to the object allowed plate solving...so apparently there IS an issue, at least with my mount setup.