I have to applaud the developers here ... thank-you for taking on the initiative to make plate solving
a cross-platform improvement and, at least from my prelim tests on linux, a significant speed boost.
I have two pi boxes: one SM OS I don't mess with and one for compile and test. How can I help ?

This is a reproducible error:

SEP | StellarSolver | 4-ParallelSmallScale
I unchecked 'Auto DownSample' just to see that I am still on a working profile, but:

I try to solve M57 and it fails.

I try another one (M65), and get an eyefull:



Another run, same result:

So it is expected that new features can go the nightly. It's 3.5.0 Beta. The only real way to find if the new SEP profiles really work is to test them on all possible configurations. Btw, this is exactly the SAME SEP as it was before in the stable build. The difference is that the previous SEP "options" were hard-coded in KStars, and now they're configurable. A friend of mine actually has issues with focus as well, and today I'm going to monitor remotely the autofocus operation on his RC to fine-tune any parameters and perhaps create a "reflector" SEP profile.

Can you please share a link to the image so I can try to reproduce this crash?

You've got mail!

Jasem, I don't know whether this is important or not: the M65 file has no CFA pattern because it was (as far as I remember) acquired as a colour pattern in a fits file (?).

Right I can't figure out what's going now here, I can see the crash when it downsamples. Sending it to Robert to check out.

"Something still missing is the ability to load a raw image for Load and Slew."

By this do you mean Canon raw or something like that?

If so, that would be reasonable to add certainly, but right now I'm focused on making sure that Focus and Guide work well. Maybe we can add this before the release. There is code in KStars to convert Raw to FITS I think. The other thing I think would be nice would be TIFF support, which should also be possible.

Apologies for going off topic. But yes, I was referring to Canon CR2/CR3, and Nikon NEF. I image in native format because it's an easier workflow as it is compatible with darks and bias captured in camera without ekos. Currently I have to make a point of saving a FITS image to use later as a realignment frame.

Yes, support for Canon CR2 would be fine, if this could be integrated sometime in the future.

About tiff-support. I can solve my tiff-pics without problems. The only thing is, that for opening the tiffs in the align-module in kstars, you must delete the Filter "images" in the opening dialog

btw. It looks like the astrometry.cfg is not needed anymore now. Thanks for fixing this.

For me, downsampling (from1 to 5) does not work at all, I will leave this unchecked.
The message "Solver Failed" came very fast each time.

But from my perspective, the new downsampling code is responsible for a crash when I try to solve M65. This was the fits file that previously caused no problem at all.

TheSkyX uses sextractor. In case this is helpful, these are the settings both of my rigs use, one is a cadiotrope, the other is a reflector refractor.