franco The problem is not the ASIAir in general. The problem is when you push the limits of anything (Car, Airplane and yes the ASIAir), you will encounter difficult to solve issues that do not offer great return on the work involved to solve them. The typical engineering problem, 90% of issues are easy, 10% of issues are really difficult.
When the FOV is very small, the indexes for plate solving get very large. For 8' - 11', they are 1.5 GB and for 2.0' - 2.8' they are around 13.5 GB. Consider that the 'disk' size is 32 GB for a lot of these units, it does not leave much space. I believe luxo's scope has a relatively tight FOV.
The Raspberry Pi 4B (for the pro series) is very slow and memory limited. Even the Raspberry Pi 5 does not get much better. Plate solving tight FOV is going to be very slow and regularly time-out. The Raspberry Pi and as a consequence, the ASIAir just does not have the horse power needed for tight FOV plate solving. There are also very few stars in the FOV and the contrast and other options are used for typically planetary or lunar imaging makes plate solving even worse as fewer stars are often visible. Once plate solving is broken, meridian flip and polar alignment are also dicey.
Lastly, you design for the average and cover as wide of a range as possible. The ASIAir is not a perfect astrophotography solution. It is a very good one, providing a great astrophotography suite at a very inexpensive price and allowing for very low power requirements. If the ASIAir is not sufficient for what someone is using it for, then their only option is to get something that is sufficient. There are others out there but having the simple menu integration that ZWO has done, I doubt you will find one that is inexpensive and as easy to use. These generally use a full-up computer and not a lightweight arm computer and use direct or VNC connection.
There is a difference between being silent and having unreasonable expectations. I do not expect my Subaru to perform demanding off-road driving like a Jeep does. It can do some but is definitely not the ideal solution and I need to limit my expectations of what it can do. This product is an inexpensive device that offers the ability to control astrophotography sessions very well. It is also easy to use even for a beginner. Other products offer a lot more capability but at the cost of simplicity.
