I have about 5 images out of about 48 taken over the last year and a half that I couldn't solve either through the internal matching system, or the astrometry system. All of the 5 get about 98% to finish, then the timeout pops up at 5 minutes and they don't complete. Adjusting the timer to 8 or 10 minutes would help on these difficult images I'm guessing, but don't know for sure. If you want to take a look at them, I can put them in a download for you.
Thanks,
Andrew
Performance of astrometry.net varies widely. On some days solving one image takes 30 seconds, while on other days the exact same image doesn't get solved after 10 minutes. You may want to wait a day or two before trying it again. Also, try it with selecting the option to upload the whole image.
Right now Observatory has a hard timeout limit of 5 minutes per image. When the progress indicator is at 98%, it doesn't mean that astrometry.net has almost solved it. The service doesn't provide an estimate for the duration. It only means that the 5 minutes is almost up.
I have been considering a preference or an option in the dialog for the timeout (e.g. slider for 2, 5 or 10 minutes). You want me to add it?
Yeah, I think that would be helpful. I was able to solve the image right on nova.astrometry.net without much issue. It even lets you download the solved image as a fits file. I tried loading the solved image into Observatory and it shows WCS for the image with its center location, but it does not work with any of the overlays, nor does it auto tag the image with anything pictured in it. I can Unmatch it, it retains the WCS and centerpoint, but will not solve again with any of the matching tools.
Interesting. Please share the image using dropbox, so I can determine why that is.
I'll add the setting in 1.2.4.
Here's the set of images I couldn't get to match. M33 Processed.fits is the one that solved on nova.astrometry.net, and had the WCS saved into it. I didn't manually plate solve the other images on there, but they have all been plate solved before (through Astrobin), so I know they should work.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cuw3foryfk98rza/not-matched.zip?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/cuw3foryfk98rza/not-matched.zip?dl=0)
Thanks, I've downloaded them. I'll look into it for the next maintenance release.
fyi, in Observatory 1.3 you can now adjust the timeout.