I found something else interesting recently, which I posted on the Software Bisque forum. I didn't receive a useful response unfortunately so am still not sure why it's ocurring, but....
1) There are no USNO stars used in the plate solve even when there is no equal UCAC star, yet there are USNO stars of about equal magnitude to the UCAC stars that are used.
2) There are stars marked in the plate solve in CCDSoft that are not shown at all in TheSky, yet I have configured TheSky to show the most stars I seem to be able to get it to show. Yet at the same time there are stars visible in TheSky that are not used in the plate solve.
I would have expected that in (1) the USNO stars would have been used to boost the plate solve accuracy. I would have expected that all stars used in the plate solve would have been visible in TheSky (2).
See:
http://www.bisque.com/SC/forums/thread/18816.aspx
(if you can access it).
For anyone interested in looking.
I have managed to continue with my automation, using fairly long plate solve exposures I am getting reasonable success rate in plate solving, I'm not sure how much, but I'd guess about 2/3 are successful. So it's not a huge hinderence right now.
I've postponed the purchase of TPoint while I see how it goes at the moment.
