Failing to Flip

Sequence Generator
1

Hi,

Among other strange behavior during last night imaging was failure to do a meridian flip. This morning I was reviewing the settings and notices that the period of time before or after meridian is defaulted to zero. Does this field have to have a non-zero number in it for meridian flip to take place?

Attached is the settings on my EQMOD v2.00q.

Thanks

image
image.png1020×771 218 KB

2

Hi,

Based on your screenshot I think there is nothing wrong there: if you don’t enable mount limits the “Apply limits” flag has no effect.
As I experience you can leave the time before/after meridian flip at zero. The only concern could be if your mount is not settling quickly enough after the flip.

3

Thanks.

In fact SGP did a meridian flip just fine given the way things are set.

The problem is that SGP doesn’t tell you that it is in the middle of imaging and therefore it will initiate the flip as soon as the image is completed and downloaded, it just keeps going into negative time until the image it was taking is completed.

I remember there is a setting where we configure SGP to deal with in-progress work at meridian flip such as pause progress until flip is completed or delay flip until progress is completed. I don’t see that at Telescope tab and don’t recall where I have seen that feature. It would be best if SGP told the user what it was doing, in my case, something like “completing current action before meridian flip” so that the user knows it is going to happen.

Farzad

4

Hi Farzad,

What works for me is the following:

  • on the Telescope tab, I enable “Use auto meridian flip”.
  • I click on the SET button, and in the dialog behind I flag “Wait for meridian”.
  • I flag “Auto center after meridian flip” flag also

With this setting you loose some minutes of imaging but you can be sure that your session will stop and wait for the meridian flip if you have less than the frame length ( f.e. 5min ) left until the meridian flip. Then it executes the flip and recenters. It will only start the next frame when this is done and the guiding is resumed.

I hope it helps,

Janos

5

Thanks for sharing.

6

I’m not entirely sure what this means. SGP will 100% wait until the meridian flip has completed and will not execute a flip during an image. If you need for the flip to happen right when you’ve specified you’ll need to use the “Wait for Meridian” option.

Is it possible that something (like EQMOD) did the flip for you and it didn’t happen through SGP?

Thanks,
Jared

7

Jared,

What I meant to say is that when the time for meridian flip arrives, and SGP is in the middle of imaging, rather than a notice to the user that SGP knows it should be flipping and it going to do so as soon as the im-progress-image is done, it says nothing and it simply continues to count down the time-to-flip clock into negative time. This makes a use think that SGP is not going to flip; but it does as soon as the image is captured.

Farzad