The blind can see

It works! giving an old image of the M31 for the solver yielded a quick positive identification and a nice annotated version showing the objects discovered.

After a few tries I managed to compile the current development version of the astrometry.net blind solver and with a few tweaks also the annotation component under Cygwin. Now I can start working on the interesting projects of plate solving based polar alignment and plate solved goto refinement as well as make preparations for future gallery entries with nice lists of objects and suitable metadata.