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?

... 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

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.

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.

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.

Please have a look at class AstrometryParser. Is this a typo?

virtual bool startSovler(const QString &filename, const QStringList &args, bool generated = true) = 0;

I assume you mean the "startSovler" part?

I would say yes, somebody meant to write startSolver and goofed. I just took a peek, and it looks like it has been called that for more than 4 years. That is fairly easy to change, but I am not sure we need to do so because:

The good news is that all those astrometryparsers should not really be needed anymore because now all that options parsing is handled internally in StellarSolver to make the code simpler and cleaner. Not only that, the same options profiles will work for all the methods StellarSolver uses, ASTAP, internal solver, local astrometry, and online solver, instead of having many different options for the different methods of solving all in different places and some in configuration files that could be set incorrectly. Now it is just one set of options, all internal in KStars in the one place, so you can'f have a messed up file somewhere preventing your astrometry from working.

KStars Built Build: 2020-10-30T03:22:05Z
Last night I compiled StellarSolver and KStars. I was pleased to find importing RAW images is now supported Thank you.
I also tested with a few other files, and noticed one of my JPG images I had successfully been solving does not load properly now. The image itself is now distorted.

The original jpg is also attached.

I also had one image I previously could solve in around 10 seconds but now took at least 80 seconds to do. My trouble is, now that half of the preset profiles have been pruned out, I am not sure what settings made up the difference. I can recall I had some of my best results with the now removed Fast Solver preset.
This image is attached. The Bubble Nebula.

Lastly. I do not believe the RAM check is not reliable at the moment. I have encountered some crashes with it on. I believe I am just on the limit of stable use of Load All Indexes on a Pi with 4GB. It will either:
1. Work really fast with indexes loaded into RAM
2. Will say I do not have enough RAM and work slower
3. Or concerningly it will say I can load into RAM, but then crashes.
I have attached logs that should help, but do note they were from an earlier build, details are included.

Thank you.

Edit: I found that JPGs exported specifically from GIMP are distorted when loaded. Any ideas as to why that might be? The image used to load without issues until only very recently.

This is a post which is slightly off-topic:

I have the impression that we have reached the point where the development is freezed. This will give the development team time to update the user guide.
That's all very well and -no doubt- a lot of work.
But I would like to know when KStars' API Reference will reflect the new code base of the upcoming version 3.5.0?
Will stellarsolver's code base be merged with KStars' code base?
Is the majority of the API Reference automatically generated as soon as version 3.5.0 is a stable release?
I am sure that there will be talented developers in the future who will maintain and improve the programs. But an up-to-date API Reference could pave the way for users who would like to understand a little bit of the underlying source code, which to my eyes is really complex.
The knowledge of the developers is valuable and should be passed on. Maybe they could write a book about coding in Qt and C++ using KStars/EKOS and INDI as the examples. Some UML charts, more explanations.
Sorry for bothering you, just dreaming.