rfulen01 Also this was during a full moon so do you think the excessing light could have been an issue?
In general, the answer is yes (the Moon will reduce the signal to noise ratio and thereby make star detection problem more difficult). A narrowband filter will often improve it, as long as you bump the exposure time up to capture sufficient stars.
However, from your description, ASIAIR is plate solving by starting with a ridiculous focal length. It seems that plate solve does not even have a chance to start with a focal length of 0.
Have you tried sending the captured image to astrometry.net? There is a web tool at astrometry.net to plate solve. It will accept virtually any image format (from JPEG to PNG to TIFF to FITS). It takes a little longer (sometime a few minutes, when their computer is overloaded), but if astrometry.net will not solve, practically nothing else will.
astrometry.net will not return the focal length since it does not know what sensor/camera you are using. It will return a plate scale, and from there, knowing your own camera's pixel pitch, you can derive the true focal length.
However... if ASIAIR did not take "0" as the starting focal length, it also may not take the focal length that you derived from astrometry.net.
It seems that your root problem is not being able to start plate solving at some reasonable focal length (or zero).
Check carefully again when ASIAIR is plate solving. When it is trying it, you will see an intermediate screen. That screen will show the focal length ASIAIR is starting at.
If the intermediate screen is showing zero, then ASIAIR is always solving to some silly focal length instead of starting at some silly focal length.
One reason could be that there is some hot pixels that ASIAIR is mistaking for a known asterism of stars (you can check if it is doing that by capping your telescope, even in the daytime). But I am under the impression that ASIAIR should be rejecting bad pixels (easy to do) before it plate solves. You have to be really unlucky (like winning the lottery type of chance) that hot pixels form a known asterism of real stars.
It would be better if you could post an image we can look at. Without the image that you are trying to solve, I am really flying blindly making guesses. With an image, we can at least narrow down the thousands of possibility why plate solving failed for you.
Chen
