Colin created a new topic ' Does Any of This Work At All' in the forum. 3 years ago

I have spent all day and all night on this and as far as I can tell this stuff just doesn't work. I don't think I am trying to do anything complex. I haven't attached any equipment. Instead I have started with the simulated devices and nothing works. I wish I hadn't wasted money on the RPi4 I bought for this but at least it wasn't that expensive and I can use it for something else.

I have installed this stuff twice now just in case I was doing something wrong. I have not changed any of the default settings. Surely it is not too much to expect that the default settings in the simulated devices actually work? All I am trying to do is a simple plate solve using "Capture & Solve" in the polar alignment module. I have never got it to work. All I get is "PSS: Stopping, Solver failed too many times" and "Please check you have sufficient stars in the image". That is a joke. The simulated camera looking through the simulated telescope at a simulated sky can't see enough stars even though I can see dozens on the screen. Even with an exposure of 30 seconds, the simulated camera can't see enough stars. It just goes into a loop solving the first image until it gives up.

I currently use an ioptron iPolar to do polar alignment and when I compare that to this it is a joke. iPolar just works straight out of the box with a real sky and a lot of light polution. This doesn't even work with the simulated environment. I was hoping to use this for other plate solving but I have no confidence that works either.

If anyone can tell me how this stuff can be made to work I will be very grateful otherwise I'll just reformat the SD card and give up on this. I can't attach a log file because that doesn't work either; at least not that I can find. The errors say "Enable alignment logging in Setup Tab -> Logs" which I have done but after doing that and trying the plate solve again the "Open Logs Directory" button says "/home/astroberry/.local/share/kstars/logs: No such file or directory". 
 

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