Getting started in the hobby is a learning journey. It's the little things. I was able to solve my plate solving issue, and maybe the following helps somebody in the future:

• Increasing gain. For some reason I had set it to 0, yielding too few stars for the solve. Setting it to >200 greatly increased that count.
• Not narrowing down the initial solve to the reported coordinates from the mount. I have a mobile setup and only crudely align to north.

Hi Jasem,

Thank you for the very swift response (and warm welcome)! Indeed I tried different solver profiles, and in my past attempts, specifically checked FOV settings, GPS coordinates, etc., both in the iPad app as well as in the VNC session. I've also increased the accuracy to 270 arcsec (following this tutorial: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JdtL950RjQ&t=1911s). I'm looking forward to StellarSolver 2.0 then.

In the meantime, I've found some of the logs, and I'm going to trawl through them for further hints what my current issue is.

Best,
  Boris

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Hi all,

Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to practical astronomy and astrophotography, but I have a fair bit of general understanding of software stuff and data processing.

I'm approaching the forum with the following observation: I set up Stellarmate (OS download on an existing RPi v4, 4GB) with my AZ GTi mount, taking pictures through a 72/420 refractor with a ZWO ASI178MC. When I first used my setup with automatic GOTO, Stellarmate worked like a charm (a few UI inconsistencies aside): Scope pointed north, mount homed in on target, and after a few slew-to-target iterations I was in business. However, despite my night sky becoming better due to weather, the last few evenings have been frustrating. Every single plate solve seems to fail. I tried numerous permutations of exposure time (1-30 sec), gain, offset as well as solving parameters (those available within the app as well as directly in EKOS), FOV and focal length are indicated correctly, and still I can't get it to work. I also tried installing additional index files as well as ASTAP, to no avail. I'm pretty much stuck.

I think my questions are: Is this a common issue and/or have a potentially broken my system? What's the best approach for debugging in that situation? Is there an easy check whether my index files have been corrupted? I appreciate I'm taking pictures from a heavily light-polluted environment, which of course is a variable source of noise, despite the weather conditions becoming better. However, in a few videos I saw on YouTube, people seemed to say that Stellarmate was ideal for EAA in city environments.

Before annoying Stellarmate support with something I could have easily ruled out myself, I thought I'd give it a shot here on the forum.

Any hints?

Boris

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