Unable to find index files

[hamed-AM]

Dear Dustin,

Hope you are doing well.

I have installed astrometry.net on my ubuntu 20 virtual machin, but I have trouble solving my fields: It compies there are no index files. I'm sure I have copied at least one of them into /usr/loca/astrometry/data directory, and edited the config file within /usr/local/astrometry/etc accordingly.

Here are some shots of what is happening:

I have tried installing from the source on another Ubuntu installation, but the same problem does exist.

Your help would be highly appreciated.

Thanks Hamed

[dstndstn]

Notice in the last screenshot that it says it's reading the config file /etc/astrometry.cfg (not /usr/local/astrometry/etc/astrometry.cfg)

You can tell solve-field to use a specific config file with the --config <filename> option.

[hamed-AM]

Thanks, Dustin ... Solved!

So, you see my solve-filed command goes very long as I add many options. Is there a way to save all the required options in a file and load a single file to tell about the options (rather than typing one by one)?

Thanks Hamed

[dstndstn]

No, I'm afraid not. You could always define a shell alias -- eg if you use bash, put in your ~/.bashrc file

alias my-solve-field='solve-field --config /usr/local/astrometry/etc/astrometry.cfg'

and then run "my-solve-field" instead of "solve-field"

[hamed-AM]

Dear Dustin, Thank you again...Very helpful.

Could you please have a look at two of the images I want to solve?

I do astrometry on these images using (for example) solve-field light.jpec --scale-units arcsecperpix --scale-low 0.40 --scale-high 0.50 --sigma=2.5 --overwrite --continue --downsample 2 --nsigma=5

by the way, I would like to know the best values for options to perform a more accurate and fast job. Could you please advise on these?

Bests Hamed

[dstndstn]

Those options seem fine. To make source detection a bit faster, you can add "--no-remove-lines" and "--uniformize 0". To make the matching faster, you can figure out which parity to use: "--parity pos" or "--parity neg" (try both and see which one results in a solution). If you know the approximate RA,Dec, you can include that with "--ra", "--dec" and "--radius". You could tighten up the scale range a bit (as small as maybe +- 2%).