Hello friends
I have a basic setup which is
A tripod
Canon 1500D
250mm kit canon lense
Ioptron skyguider pro which is manual mount

I bought raspberry pi and flashed StellarMate on it. My problem is after taking the picture it says astrometric alignment failed

I have setup a profile with Ioptron as mount canon 1500d as CCD . Mount is in no way connected to pi. But if I don't specify it in profile there is no capture and solve option. I have specified the lense focal length in optical train also.

Am I fundamentally wrong? Is StellarMate only meant for goto mount ? Can it not do blind solving???

My aim is to do polar alignment because Polaris is not visible in city bortle 8 sky. Also to get Ra and dec of center so I can manually locate target. Any help would be very very useful. I'm disheartned

Don't give up, help is on it's way

In that case simply use the telescope simulator as mount and slew in the simulator to that target that you are currently manually aiming to. Then plate solving should work.

HTH
Wolfgang

Problem is it says astrometry alignment failed. That means it's not able to plate solve. How to go about it . I used all sky plate solver on PC . So it could not solve my image from rosette nebula. After connecting to astrometry . Net I found my focal length us 239mm not 250mm . That's strange . May b I'll try with stellar mate tonight and see if things improve.

A slightly shorter focal length is nothing unusual. Could you please post your logs for further analysis?

Please find the attached error ekos gives. This I've obtained using the vnc interface of stellarmate. Also the image captured . This image was solved on nova astrometry. All attached

Have you checked whether the astrometry files are present? It might be that the files for the corresponding lens are missing.

How to check that in stellar mate

1. Start KStars, Ekos and your profile.
2. Then switch to the alignment tab and click on the "Options..." button in the right lower corner, which opens the alignment options
3. Switch to the "Index Files" section. Here you can check which files are installed and install those that are missing

Here is a screenshot:

Thanks mate. Indeed all indexes are installed
I found a solution . If I untickin the tab scale and position the option use position Ra ekos becomes a blind solver . Now it shows the ra and dec of pictue after click.

The only thing is I have to operate all this from vnc interface.

Thanks everyone for your help. Finally I solved it . I Uninstaller stellarmate and installed astroberry. Stellarmates mobile app sucks . So for people with manual mount and dslr like me following is the work flow

1. Login to astroberry and start Kstars and goto Ecos tab

2. Define a profile . For this one we define telescope simulator and CCD as Canon DSLR

3.Start the profile and make sure the dslr and simulator are connected . For dslr we have to define pixel size picture size which is camera specific and one time setting

4. In telescope lense define the focal length. Search online because a 250mm lense in my case had 239mm focal length

5. Goto ekos and select a target and right click and say center in telescope

6. In ekos dart icon press capture and solve. Make sure you have selected "nothing" radio button so that the telescope sticks where it is . Now you should get plate solved Ra and dec . Match this with telescope ra and dec by moving up down and right left adjustments in your mount

For such an easy task I spent 4 sleepless nights . The catch of plate solving is . Your plate solver should know which part of sky you are pointing to and what what you want to locate