Plate Solve Challenges

[ztresearch]

I am new to Observatory and am trying to plate solve landscape images in order to make measurements of features of aurora and transient luminous events.  I have attempted to plate solve the attached image, but have been unsuccessful using solve and blind solve (using the raw file).  Would appreciate any thoughts and suggestions on this endeavor.   Thank you, Tom W.

[Sander Berents]

The bottom 1/3 will cause a lot of confusion for the star detection phase of the plate solver. You may want to try it by cutting the bottom 1/3 of your image, or by blackening it with image processing software.

I would also try that with the blind plate solver and its "Upload whole image" option (increase the timeout value in that case as well).

Observatory's platesolver already automatically limits itself to the center of an image if needed though. I therefore also wonder if it's an issue with the plate scale. Do you have an estimate of the plate scale (arcs seconds / pixel)? You may want to specify that in the plate solver (click the toggle on the left in the dialog box to see the setting).