Please bear with me as my experience with plate-solving is limited to running it in Ekos during polar alignment or slewing to a target.
I am running on an Rpi 4, Raspbian "Buster" Version 10; Kstars 3.40, Build: 2020-01-06T10:36:16Z (I have this working with all equipment after working out some 'bugs' in the setup, so I don't want to upgrade right now - although I do a clone backup SD card)
I have ASTAP with the G17 and G18 index files loaded. I recall using this local solver succesfully in the past, but as I indicated with a wider FOV setup.
I have Astrometry.net solver loaded (solve-field) with the set of index files that Ekos recommended for this f/10 setup.
And now I have Sextractor and SexySolver-Tester loaded on the Rpi.
This is an image from an imaging session on May 7th. I captured this image and saved it, then captured another after starting the polar alignment routine, the second image solved using online Astrometry.net in 102 seconds
"Solver RA (280.54) DEC (80.339) Orientation (275.58) Pixel Scale (0.48818)" the RA/Dec values seem strange since after completing the first round of the PA routine it said I was off the NCP by 3 1/2 degrees.
I just uploaded the first image file to here:
May7th fits image
I also just now uploaded this file to Astrometry.net and it started processing the file and it failed?
I have run this image thru ASTAP with both the G17 and G18 star databases and both failed. I think ASTAP only used 100-200 stars.
I am now trying SexySolverLibrary Tester. It says it found 3525 stars (it must be picking up a lot of noise or hot pixels - I did not do any dark subtraction on this image)
I am running it using the internal Sextractor and Internal SexySolver. I have not explored all the other options but I did set the scale arcminwidth to 20 low and 30 high.
it is running a long time over 300 seconds, so I suspect it will fail as well.
I will look to find another image that I can get to solve using Astrometry.net online, like it usually does during observing and try these other solvers.
As I said I am a 'little' lost here. I gather using this tester I can try solving an image using the internal program, ASTAP, local Astrometry.net as well as the online versions of some of them.
It would help me if you can give me a set of directions of how to proceed. Otherwise I will need to read thru the 15 pages of this forum topic to see what others have done.
thanks,
Ron