In EKOS Align under 'options' there is a configuration screen for 'Align Options Profiles Editor'. On my setup plate solving is about 75% successful. My question is: Is there documentation / how to for the this? My success rate improved dramatically when I switched from Default to Small Scale Solving. My hope is there may be additional optimizations for my setup. I would like to create a tailored config but can't find any documentation for the config.
Thanks in advance, Dan

I wish there were some documentation on this since virtually everyone has difficulty with plate solving. However, it is worth some time looking at the ToolTips in each of the parameter entry boxes to understand how to optimize the process. There are two steps to plate solving, extracting stars from your image, then matching the extracted stars to the library images. The extraction of stars is done using a program called SExtractor. There is some documentation on SExtractor on the web mostly useful for developers but it is helpful to look at to get a better ideas of what the program is doing. Basically, you select parameters to detect stars above a brightness and size value. You don't want to detect noise as stars nor do you want to select every star in your image, so there are parameters to filter out the dimmer stars and ones that are not round. One SExtractor has done its job you have to prepare the extracted image. For a telescopic image you want to limit the number of stars you pass to the plate solver to 50-100 or so from an initial selection of 500-1000. Too many stars and the plate comparison will take too long, too few and the plate comparison will not yield a result. I think the SmallScaleSolving works pretty well for starters. In my experience it is having too many stars that is the issue rather than not enough, at least for those of us who are working at a FOV of a degree or so.

I did add documentation for StellarSolver profiles in the KStars Handbook . Check out the Align section of the handbook . I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's a start.

You should check out the handbook if you are not familiar with it. Not all of the sections are up-to-date, in fact I'm sure some are very old. However, many have been updated and continue to be updated. Note that the handbook is available translated to many languages.

If you have additions/changes, your contributions would be welcome, either as a merge request for the ekos-align.docbook source file, or if you prefer, just post the text and I could make the docbook source code changes.

Your documentation is very good. Thanks for doing that.