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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

New Internal Solver for Mac, Windows, and Linux -- Testing/ Experiments needed

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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.
Last edit: 3 years 5 months ago by Jeremy Burton.
3 years 5 months ago #62198
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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.
3 years 5 months ago #62212

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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.
3 years 5 months ago #62216

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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
Last edit: 3 years 4 months ago by han.
3 years 4 months ago #62217
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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!
3 years 4 months ago #62218

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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 :)
3 years 4 months ago #62219

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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.
3 years 4 months ago #62220

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Can we get a warning in the status output for low star SNR with a recommendation to increase exposure time?
3 years 4 months ago #62222

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... and a check-box to automatically increase the exposure time if checked, and try again, say 3 times? I would not want it to be indefinite retries. This would be similar to the filter module where flats need to achieve an ADU range.

Jim
3 years 4 months ago #62224

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So,

Some progress on the crashes - it no longer crashes. Now it hangs instead. I get the infamous "The app is no longer responding - Wait or force quit" dialog.

The tail of the log is consistently this:

[2020-10-29T14:13:33.987 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.guide] - Capturing frame...
[2020-10-29T14:13:35.427 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - Autoguiding suspended until primary CCD chip completes downloading...
[2020-10-29T14:13:35.430 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - Guiding state changed from "Guiding" to "Suspended"
[2020-10-29T14:13:35.430 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.guide] - "Guiding suspended."
[2020-10-29T14:13:35.431 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.scheduler] - Guide State "Suspended"
[2020-10-29T14:13:35.462 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.indi] - "FITS" file saved to "/home/jeremy/FlipTest/Light/Luminance/FlipTest_Light_219.fits"
[2020-10-29T14:13:35.462 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.fits] - Reading file buffer ( "11.6 MiB" )
[2020-10-29T14:13:35.627 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.fits] - FITS HFR: 2.72458
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.001 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.fits] - FITHistogram: JMIndex 0.999979
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.011 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - "Download Time: 0.58 s, New Download Time Estimate: 0.64 s."
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.091 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - "Received image 219 out of 600."
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.093 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - Resuming guiding...
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.094 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.capture] - Guiding state changed from "Suspended" to "Guiding"
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.094 EDT INFO ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.guide] - "Guiding resumed."
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.095 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.guide] - Capturing frame...
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.095 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.guide] - Received guide frame.
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.095 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.ekos.guide] - Multistar: findTopStars 25
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.095 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.fits] - Sextract with: "1-Default"
[2020-10-29T14:13:36.095 EDT DEBG ][ org.kde.kstars.fits] - Reading file buffer ( "289.7 KiB" )

Again this seems to be in the SEP guiding. It hangs trying to read the buffer.

J.
3 years 4 months ago #62226

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J., I just sent this to Jasem.

Jim and Andrew, those are very very good ideas! I think both of those could make sense. We should definitely take a look.

I just made a change to the autodownsample function for the solver, to just be a little less aggressive because it was causing some failed solves since the stars were downsampled too much and were no longer starlike.
3 years 4 months ago #62231

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This change turned out to be a good move. There was one of two versions of the Iris Nebula which could not be solved - and this one can be processed now.
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3 years 4 months ago #62233

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