I am trying to stack a set of MilkyWay pics. i must be doing something fundamentally wrong when plate solving. i keep getting “not enough stars” error when i try with siril solver. I followed the other messages about the servers being down and so setup a local star database and ran it against that. that did not work as well. i then uploaded one of the pics to astrometry.net to see if it identifies anything and it did and the results are at Astrometry.net submission 12446407. i then downloaded the generated wcs.fits image and test ran to solve it locally, and even that failed with local astrometry index files setup. any pointers as to what i am missing?
Hello and welcome,
if the error is ‘not enough stars’, the problem must lie with the star detection (see this FAQ entry, the next one can be useful too: Siril - FAQ).
Use the Dynamic PSF tool to adjust the detection parameters and see if you can have enough stars detected everywhere in the image.
Thank you for the immediate response.
I did try the Dynamic PSF tool. I see logs as below in the console
( I see that some of the detected stars are shown with a purple circle and most in a red/orange colour. any reason why is that? )
19:39:35: Findstar: processing for channel 1...
19:39:36: Execution time: 471.29 ms
19:39:36: Found 3066 Gaussian profile stars in image, channel #1 (FWHM 4.022458)
19:39:46: Findstar: processing for channel 1...
19:39:47: Execution time: 752.69 ms
19:39:47: Found 2739 Moffat profile stars in image, channel #1 (FWHM 3.684900)
after that I tried plate solving again.
19:41:43: Plate solving image with astrometry.net for a field of view of 154.29 degrees
19:41:43: Using 2739 detected stars from image.
19:41:43: Astrometry.net solving blindly
...
after trying through all the index files, it fails with the message
19:42:47: solve-field: Field 1 did not solve (index index-4212.fits, field objects 11-20).
19:42:49: solve-field: Total CPU time limit reached!
19:42:49: solve-field: Field 1 did not solve (index index-4211.fits, field objects 11-20).
19:42:50: solve-field: Field: /Volumes/nvme/Milkyway-siril/result_375s.xyls
19:42:50: solve-field: Did not solve (or no WCS file was written).
19:42:50: No astrometric solution found
19:42:50: Plate Solving failed. The image could not be aligned with the reference stars.
are my source images itself bad? or am I missing anything.
ok. after multiple retries with different options selected, it finally gave the result. I am redoing the process with a different set of pics. I will be back with the results.
Sometimes drawing a selection around the center of the image first, will allow it to platesolve. Like @vinvin mentioned, the large FOV is the issue at times.
I was following your beginners video from your channel. I went from absolute 0 to at understanding the other discussions from the forum, setting up my local star database, and using it to render my stacks. thank you for the very helpful info.