Since a month I've discovered KStars and the Ekos & Indi packages and I'm impressed with the functionality it brings to my Linux system for doing astronomy/astro imaging. Keep up the great work!
As the weather is currently cloudy at my place I was experimenting offline with the plate solving part of Ekos, but I haven't been succesful so far.
I've downloaded the data for offline solving and it works when I solve from the command line, but doesn't give any solutions when doing this from within Ekos.
When I point the telescope simulator close to M31, the solver options show the following options:
Image size (4x2.5deg), RA, dec and range seem to be OK and when I try to do a "load and slew" on a DSLR image of M31 the log window shows the following logging:
2016-11-05T19:17:29 simplexy: found 2928 sources.
2016-11-05T19:17:26 Downsampling by 2...
2016-11-05T19:17:26 This looks like a multi-color image: processing the first image plane only. (NAXIS=3)
2016-11-05T19:17:26 Extracting sources...
2016-11-05T19:17:24 Reading input file 1 of 1: "/home/marakk/Astro/Capture/M31/M31_5x90s.fit"...
2016-11-05T19:17:24 /usr/bin/solve-field --no-verify --no-plots --no-fits2fits --resort --downsample 2 -O -3 359 -4 180 -5 15 -W /tmp/solution.wcs /home/marakk/Astro/Capture/M31/M31_5x90s.fit
2016-11-05T19:17:24 Starting solver...
2016-11-05T19:17:24 Using solver options: --no-verify --no-plots --no-fits2fits --resort --downsample 2 -O -3 359 -4 180 -5 15
2016-11-05T19:17:24 FITS header: Cannot find FOCALLEN.
2016-11-05T19:17:24 FITS header: Cannot find OBJCTRA. Using current mount coordinates.
After waiting a few minutes it fails (no solution).
Passing the Ekos solver options on the command line to solve-field gives me a solution within a few seconds.
So the options and solver installation seem to be OK.
From the logging however it looks like the it uses the wrong solver options: they are not correctly passed from Ekos to the solver as it seems to use RA=359deg and dec=180deg.
Does anyone know if this is caused by the fact that I'm using the simulator, or by incorrect Ekos configuration, or is this a bug in Ekos?