I’m using Astrotortilla to refine the pointing of the telescope after a goto. It works great but it can be slow as heck. One solve last night took 4 minutes! I made some parameter changes a while ago that improved things but it’s fiddly. One last thing to try is to tell it that my pointing can’t be off by more than so many degrees – i’ll try 15 degrees next time i’m out.
UPDATE: I noticed that the online plate solver at astrometry.net was solving using a different set of indexes 4111.fits for example as opposed to 4211 which i would have. I found and downloaded the 41xx indexes and the difference is night and day – solves are routinely done in 10 seconds! I haven’t needed to change the 180 degree figure to 15.
Astrophotography Newbie 