I'm getting the same issue today...

Jasem, thank you.
The update to stellarsolver's CMakeLists.txt works on Kubuntu 20.04 and I'am able to build KStars again.

Yes, he changed both KStars and sent me a pull request for Stellarsolver today to change the way the package is installed and found. Apparently this change will fix a windows build issue.

Thanks. Removing both kstars and stellarsolver and starting from scratch appears to fixed my stellarsolver cmake issue.

I'm having definite stability issues with stellarsolver. Align seems to be working fine, but running a dummy sequence with the simulators is failing somewhere in the FITS processing post capture. This has been consistent over the last few days as I have been keeping up with the changes. The SEGV goes not always occur in the exact same place, but it always occurs when doing analysis. I turned off all of the HFR calculation options and WCS load options for FITS and Ekos, but it still seems some calls go out to stellarsolver.

I am also guiding (simulated) at the time with SEP multistar, so perhaps there is a race condition between SEP in guiding and SEP in FITS analysis. I'm not sure if any of the changes made it across to guiding yet. There are references to guiding in the backtrace, but I have no idea if that has any relevance or not.

The back trace from the core dump is attached.

J.

I might be reading this wrong, because it is fairly late in the evening for me, but it looks to me like this crash occurred in KStars during guiding, after StellarSolver returned the star list, but before the method to find the guide stars completed? Perhaps the list was still needed and it got deleted in KStars too soon? I will send this to Jasem and see if he agrees.

Right, I just pushed a possible protection against that. I guess under some circumstances, the fits data object can be destroyed while the extraction is still in process.

If there are still problems with star extraction you could consider the ASTAP v0.9.442 extraction option . For an other problem I have added the option to write the extracted stars to a comma separated csv file:

-extract snr_minimum

The snr_minimum is the minimum star snr value required. Default at 30 but for solving snr_minimum=10 should be used. The output file has the same name as the image but with extension .csv and is containing the comma separated data as shown below:

It is a development version compiled for Linux and Windows. Mac and Raspberry Pi are outstanding.

Han

Thank you very much Han,

We were having an issue about a week ago with star extraction. We only found out about the issue during the integration. KStars already used SEP as you know and StellarSolver used it as well in the same way so we figured there would be no problems with that. But then we wanted to make star extraction asynchronous in KStars and then We encountered some crashes and we found that SEP had some global variables that did not work well with running it in multiple places at once. It would have been the same problem whether we were using StellarSolver or KStars to run SEP, but before this, we only ran it synchronously in one place at a time. So this wasn’t actually caused by StellarSolver but it was revealed during our integration of it. So while I was working on integrating StellarSolver itself, Jasem worked on making SEP non global. After the did that we were able to parallelize SEP and added a significant speed boost. Now it works pretty well.

Thank you very much for the additional features though, we can try adding that as an option!

Extracting very faint stars is not easy, but important for solving. I think ASTAP performs very simular as Sextractor. Having SEP internally will be from programmers point of view a superior solution but see how ASTAP performs

I did some more digging and have come to the same conclusion - it's related to guiding. I switched guiding to not use SEP at all, and my test ran smoothly for 10 hours. It's not done that before with the stellarsolver branch.

I see Jasem has made some changes, so I will pull that and see if it improves things.

J.

Can we get a warning in the status output for low star SNR with a recommendation to increase exposure time?