Plate Solving in NINA

I may be wrong about this, but this is how it has always worked for me: You first need to slew somewhere. You can do that by:

(1) selecting a star in the "Manual Focus Targets" tab and then clicking on "Slew to target;"
(2) entering coordinates manually in the "Framing" tab and clicking "Slew and Center" then either "Slew," or "Slew, Center, and Rotate" in the dropdown ("Slew, Center, and Rotate" will invoke plate solving, thus eliminating any need to do it again);
(3) using the "Sky Atlas" tab to look up a target and send the coordinates to the "Framing" tab by clicking "Set for framing assistant" (Framing tab). Then repeat step 2 without manually entering coordinates. The Sky Atlas will populate that for you;
(4) pausing or stopping a running sequence that has already slewed to the target.

The idea is that you somehow have to tell NINA where you want to be and then try to go there. After that, you can use the "Plate Solving" tab. There may be other ways to do this like using some of the manual slew controls in NINA or some feature of one of the plugins. But once NINA knows where it is you want to be, then any time you invoke plate solving, it will make the mount go to the designated coordinates as exactly as possible (within the tolerances you set in the "Options->Plate Solving" tab).

If you use the methods mentioned above, (selecting a target and slew to it from the framing assistant), Nina synchronizes the coordinates it got from the solution with the mount. (Maybe you have to enable this in the settings/equipment/mount area of Nina). So with every solution, the error between the coordinates of the location you are really pointing to and the mounts ccordinates, where it thinks it points to is updated and becomes smaller at least in the region you are trying to work in. So changing position usually gets faster after some attempts.

The way I use the framing assistant is to find my target in Stellarium first. You can set up Nina to then get the coordinates from Stellarium. It basically just takes the coordinates and rotation and then loads a picture of the sky region in its framing assistant. Then you can fine tune your image frame and send the data either to the sequencer or slew the scope from there to your target. This works really well for me. Nina is not restricted to Stellarium, you can use other tools like SkyChart or similar as well.

Sadly, Nina is only able to get the coordinates from Stellarium. Sending the coordinates to it is not possible as far as I know. This is the only feature I am missing in NINA compared to my former days with APT. APT synchronized Stellarium after plate solving an image and shows the location in Stellarium instead. This is a thing I'd much prefer. But I got used to the Nina framing assistant and with experience, there is no need to use two programs. It's just a matter of personal taste.

If you try to use Nina the way suggested above, I am sure your learning curve is more efficient, even if it's a bit harder to understand the sky this way. But it's not black magic, either.

So I wish you many beautiful images on your way…

CS

Christian

Rob Johnson:
I work as described above but also use Cartes du Ciel and in NINA there is a button to the right hand side of the sequence tab which imports the target position from CDC, I would have thought Stellarium could do the same?

This is what I tried to say. But you are just able to import the coordinates from your planetarium software. APT also exported the solution and you were able to see the solved position in Stellarium as well. This was helpful in case of blind solving.