I have used a local version of astrometry.net called Astrotortilla. It works really well but as users of this ‘blind solving’ technique may be aware, it can be slow. Now we have an opportunity to use the local server version provided by Andy with SGP.
one tip i have found which significantly enhances the solve speed performance is to identify for your scope and camera combination what index file astrometry uses. For my C11 and SBIG camera it nearly always solves with 4206- 7, so In the index folder i just have 4206-6, 4206-7 and 4206-8 that is the index it commonly uses and one either side of that, just in case (it does sometimes use index 4206-6)
So the problem is, how do you find which index file is used for your system? In Astrotortilla, just turn on logging and you can see the operations as they happen, including the index which successfully solved the plate.
I am hoping that perhaps there might be some way for this data to be provided in SGP to provide an enhanced experience for us.
The benefit in Astrotortilla is significant - I get solves between 6 and 11 seconds typically.
BTW - don’t delete the unused indexes - just put them in a folder somewhere since they can be quite large and take significant time to download if you change your scope/ camera.
There are other optimisations too, take a look at the light vortex site:
http://lightvortexastronomy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/tutorial-imaging-setting-up-and-using.html
Paul