Trying to setup my AP mount to auto flip 3 hours before the meridian. I’ve set up the meridian advance in APCC to 3 hours East and clicked the checkbox to send limit to SGP. When I set the Auto Flip parameter on in SGP telephone panel, it still says the meridian flip won’t happen until the true meridian is reached - should I ignore that or am I missing something?
i think SGP does not support flipping before the true meridian is reached. if i understand it right, the APCC “send limit to SGP” is only good for post-meridian delays and allows APCC to communicate what the current meridian limit is for the particular declination to which the scope is currently pointed. this avoids a mismatch where SGP does not flip before APCC’s meridian limit, which (in my case) will stop the mount dead in its tracks and end imaging for the night. asking APCC to perform a flip at the meridian limit does not work either, because SGP does not expect the mount to flip on its own.
my understanding of this problem is that ASCOM does not currently define enough information for a given client program to know when it is safe to flip, and so SGP is operating under the assumption that a pre-meridian flip is dangerous because it could put the telescope into the pier on the east side. there has been some discussion here about adding some variables to ASCOM that indicate how many more minutes a telescope can be on the west side of the pier or when it is safe to flip, but until that info is exported by ASCOM sgp will not be able to support pre-meridian flips.
rob
That’s probably right. Maybe Ray misunderstood my intent. I’ll have to manually flip it then, darnWayne Hixson, Stargazer