PCC fails every time

[arrowspace90]

I did a dumb thing about a week ago. I ran out of space on my SSD hard drive, so I unplugged it and used a new drive. Well, the Gaia catalog was on the old drive. When I realized that, duh, no wonder PCC wouldn't work. So, I plugged that drive back in and was confident that would fix the problem. It didn't. I tried switching to the online catalogs. Failed repeatedly. I tried switching off from the FITS image coordinates to the look up coordinates (they differed). Failed repeatedly.
So yesterday I deleted the old catalog and redownloaded it on the newer drive. It fails every time, even though I see that the new data is being used in PixInsight. I see it being referenced on the process console.
It takes forever for my fast computer to go up to "try #32" before reporting "failure to plate solve".
It says this usually happens when the coordinates are too far from the meta data. Ok, well I tried the official look up coordinates.
I made a copy of the image to put on a FB forum and the 1 guy that tried my image WAS ABLE to run PCC on it the first time! He didn't even change it from "standard spiral galaxy" and it worked. He sent me a screen shot of the PCC process and I carefully typed in exactly what worked for him. It failed. I will copy the image here.

This tells me the problem is on my end. What can prevent PCC from plate solving on my computer? I rebooted the first thing. I am not an IT guy, but I am dead in the water until I can figure this glitch out. Do you have ANY troubleshooting suggestions, because I am out of ideas.

STARS_DBE.xisf

drive.google.com

I forgot to say, my scope is RASA 8, with FL 400. Camera is ASI2600MC, pixel size 3.76. I realize that having these wrong will prevent plate solving and that this is typically the reason PCC fails, right?
Thank you.

 

[Juan Conejero]

The center coordinates provided by the RA and DEC keywords in this image are incorrect.

The image can be solved without problems if you run the ImageSolver script and specify the coordinates of NGC 6888 (you can click the Search button to find the coordinates with the Online Coordinate Search dialog). Then enter focal distance = 400 mm and pixel size = 3.76 um. Leave the rest of parameters with default values, enable distortion correction, and make sure that you have Gaia EDR3 well configured.

Image Plate Solver script version 5.6.1
===============================================================================
Referentiation matrix (world[ra,dec] = matrix * image[x,y]):
+2.15734420e-05  +5.38225383e-04  -7.85027689e-01
+5.38125173e-04  -2.15725517e-05  -1.07888181e+00
WCS transformation ....... Thin plate spline
Control points ........... 3879
Spline lengths ........... l:1879 b:1469 X:1306 Y:2050
Projection ............... Gnomonic
Projection origin ........ [2060.050669 1375.976178] px -> [RA: 20 12 11.257  Dec: +38 21 22.04]
Resolution ............... 1.939 arcsec/px
Rotation ................. 87.699 deg (flipped)
Reference system ......... ICRS
Observation start time ... 2021-06-19 03:48:22 UTC
Observation end time ..... 2021-06-19 06:45:57 UTC
Focal distance ........... 399.98 mm
Pixel size ............... 3.76 um
Field of view ............ 2d 13' 8.6" x 1d 28' 56.1"
Image center ............. RA: 20 12 11.248  Dec: +38 21 21.88  ex: -0.003971 px  ey: +0.011779 px
Image bounds:
   top-left .............. RA: 20 08 14.751  Dec: +37 16 26.58  ex: +0.036763 px  ey: +0.002688 px
   top-right ............. RA: 20 08 34.976  Dec: +39 29 23.66  ex: +0.068710 px  ey: +0.057345 px
   bottom-left ........... RA: 20 15 40.890  Dec: +37 12 55.94  ex: +0.021862 px  ey: +0.011833 px
   bottom-right .......... RA: 20 16 14.992  Dec: +39 25 47.60  ex: -0.002852 px  ey: +0.010073 px

PCC then works like a charm with APASS DR10 and default parameters.

I strongly recommend that you make sure that all of the metadata generated in your raw data is correct and sufficient. As an absolute minimum, you should always include metadata for image scale (focal length, pixel size), valid center coordinates (right ascension and declination where the telescope has been aimed at on the sky), acquisition UTC times, and geodetic coordinates (longitude, latitude and height of your observation location).

 

[arrowspace90]

I greatly appreciate this response. I have carefully and repeatedly utilized the Image Solver Script.
Frustratingly, it fails for me every time.
I tried to exactly follow the directions given above, using the coordinate search feature (NGC 6888). Focal length and pixel size filled in.
When the script failed, using my star catalog, I feared that somehow it is not properly configured (though I followed a tutorial to set it up again), so I tried the online search for that also. But it still fails.
My use of Image Solver is attached. Where can I possibly be making such a bad error?
Another question is why my telescope/mount are suddenly giving incorrect coordinates that cause PCC to fail?
Once again I want to thank you for taking the trouble to try and help this user accomplish what has worked in the past and is now so difficult to fix.

 

[arrowspace90]

I tried to check my path to the Gaia files and it seemed to work. So I still am not able to fix my issue. Not being a professional computer IT person isn't helping me.

 

[arrowspace90]

Update: Success!
When I checked the box in PCC to "ignore meta-data" PCC worked immediately. I so appreciate these tips. It is difficult to find help for arcane failures.
Now, I will try to figure out why bad coordinates are going into my FITS headers, but that is not a PixInsight problem.

 

[sreilly]

Thanks for the thread as it just solved some of the problems I was having with my image LDN673 which for whatever reason was off by 8 degrees in RA. As it's written when the image is downloaded and in my case the image is plate solved on each download (ACP Expert) I can't imagine how the meta data is so far off. My issue was not checking the box to Ignore the META data. Still a mystery but at least the RGB image is solved and corrected.