The Southern hemisphere is always tricky. From what I can see the PierSide that EQMOD is reporting using 1.24g is reversed, East when it should be West. It is also shown incorrectly on the display. “West, pointing East” isn’t correct for an azimuth of 234 deg, it should be “East, pointing West”.
It’s incorrect in the same way with the “Pointing” mode.
The “Physical” mode is OK for hour angle 0 but incorrect for the others.
Have you posted this on the EQMOD group? Part of the reason this hasn’t been fixed is that the developers aren’t aware of it.
So I can do testing and document correctly before I post on EQMOD site, please explain the terms “West, Pointing East” Does this mean the telescope is on the west side of the mount (and pointing toward the east), and therefore the counter weights are on the East side of the mount? I have always found the explanation on the ASCOM site to be very confusing.
Hi @scott_astroman , that’s exactly what it means. As an example: if you start photographing early in the evening and your object is, let’s say, in the south east, then your scope will be on the west site of the pier (or tripod), pointing to the east with the counterweigths on the opposite side. That’s when EQMOD will display “West pointing east”. During the evening your scope will be turning towards the pier/tripod and eventually hit it. When your object passes throught the south and therefore reaches the meridian, SGP will do a meridian flip and your scope switches sides from west of the pier to east of it. EQMOD will then display Ëast pointing west". Another way to remember it is this: your scope will always be in the southern half of the pier/tripod, turning from east to west through south.
I have been experimenting with the different EQMOD side of pier settings. I moved the mount to a “West, pointing East” position. Interestingly, despite the fact that the mount position on the EQMOD dialog box reports “West, pointing East”, the property reported to SGPro through the Get SideofPier command as per the ASCOM trace changes from 0 (East pointing West) to 1 (West pointing East) depending upon the pointing model chosen. Based on the Get SideofPier property, I have now tested every RA by changing my computer clock. Results as follows for Southern Hemisphere:
a) Physical: Mount at “West pointing East”–seemed all ok. I was unable to reproduce Chris concerns.
b) 1.24g: Mount at “West pointing East”-all times reporting incorrectly “East, pointing West” as Chris suggested. Similarly, when the mount was “East, pointing West”, the reported pier side was “West Pointing East” via SideofPier property.
c) Pointing: Mount at “West pointing East”-all times report East, pointing West.
So for me in the Southern hemisphere, I will stick with the Physical pointing model.
Perhaps later versions of EQMOD have fixed this issue, but I have not tested.
Folks… I really appreciate all the feedback on this thread, but I must admit that I don’t feel any more comfortable guiding an EQMOD user than I did at the genesis of this post. I hate to say it… but with respect to my original point, this thread is “self-validating”. Not sure what to do with this in terms of guidance…
I have run the ASCOM Conformance for EQMOD 1.28b on my mount AZ-EQ6GT with side of Pier at each of the options. Attached in dropbox links below.
Unfortunately the physical pointing model which meridian flips properly doesn’t conform. The pointing model and V1.24g models appear to conform but don’t meridian flip properly.
There’s very little that can be done from here. This is really something that the EQMOD developers need to know about. No one seems to have consulted them about this.
What is happening is that EQMOD has multiple pier side modes. Their function varies from version to version and there have been multiple versions. The same function will change how it behaves from version to version.
Given this it’s surprising that there has been so little confusion.
What I’d do if I were the EQMOD developers would be to remove all the pointing state options and implement one internally - properly. From the mount controller’s point of view it’s actually quite simple.
Users should not be concerned with setting this, pointing state is a property of the mount and does not have multiple definitions.
The “West pointing East” definitions are as Jeroen says, the OTA on the West of the mount looking to the East but this definition is a trap because it only applies for a mount looking SE. When the mount tracks past the meridian it will still have the OTA on the West but now it is looking slightly West. The pointing state has not changed.
It does change when the pier flip is done and the mount slews through 180 degrees about the hour angle axis and twice the zenith distance in declination.
Now the pointing state is East, looking West.
Six hours later the OTA is above the mount with the counterweight shaft pointing down. The OTA will move from being on the East side of the mount to the West but the pointing state should not change. It is still East, looking West. EQMOD gets this wrong with the physical PierSide option.
I don’t have any short term solution. I’m going to try to get the Pointing State documented better but we have been trying this for years and it’s obvious that no matter what we do people will misinterpret or ignore us. It looks as if Conform isn’t strict enough with how it tests the pointing state and will accept combinations that aren’t correct. I’m putting a pier side tester together that does additional tests to check this.
While I think the users should be contacting the EQMOD people about this it would probably help if Ken and Jared did as well.
For your info attached are some photos from the conform test run. You will note the scope points toward the ground in some of the tests. I assume this is a Southern Hemisphere issue-not sure if the issue is conform or EQMOD, however the scope works properly with SGPro.
I hope this will help users and developers find out what’s going on.
Please bear in mind that there’s very little I can do to fix things. In most cases I’m not involved in the driver or application development. Having a way to make repeatable tests should help.
You will need to contact the appropriate developers if you want to get things fixed.
This what you need to do to use EQMOD successsfully:
Use EQMOD version 1.28k This is now available from the SourceForge
site.
In the Northern Hemisphere select the SideOfPier mode “Pointing” or
“V1.24g”.
In the Southern hemisphere no SideOfPier mode is totally correct.
“Physical” is least wrong. It works in the hour axis range from -6
to +6 hrs and will handle the Pier flip at hour angle 0 (that’s
looking North).
In case any Eqmod/Eqascom users haven’t noticed or aren’t aware, Chris Shillito has posted a new test release which he hopes has solved this issue for both northern and southern hemisphere users, v1.28m. The recommended option is ‘Pointing’.
Thanks Barry, I’ve seen that but haven’t had a chance to try it yet.
So, taking Scott’s earlier recommendations and modifying them with Barry’s update we get the current recommended EQMOD settings.
A) Don’t use any pointing model at all. Let plate solve manage the whole alignment process.
B) Use EQMOD version 1.28m and set the side of pier option to "pointing"
C) Do not enable meridian flip in the eqmod software. Let sgpro manage the process.
D) Set the meridian flip at 2 degrees past meridian.
E) Set the mount meridian software limits at greater than 2 degrees.
F) Set the epoch in the mount as J2000
G) Alignment/sync user interface set to “dialog based”.
I would like to take screen shots of the data collected in this thread (for the help file). Two quick questions:
Can I get to these settings without connecting a mount? We don’t have an EQMOD compatible mount for testing right now.
I have applied for membership to the group, but if anyone can provide me the 1.28m installer via dropbox (a PM please) I would appreciate it… or this might not matter if I can’t screen shot the items in the checklist. In that case, I would beg one of our wonderful EQMOD users to do so.
I’m a fairly new user (still on my trial period) and I used this thread,with the help of some other users on the forums, to help me get Meridian Flips working properly. I am using Dialog Based, and my other dropdown simply says “Nearest Point” and flips work perfectly. My point count has always been zero and I have never needed to adjust this value. My assumption is that by using the settings I picked, the point count always stays at zero. But I think you’re correct by telling new users to insure that the count should be zero, and if its anything else, they should clear the alignment points out.
In your next screenshot, you’re pointing to the “horizon” area of EQMOD. I have nothing in this section. The important thing is to set the limits in the Meridian box right above it. What you’re showing in the screenshot shows the yellow markers right at the 0 and 12 positions, and this is too restrictive. It needs to look more like this:
The meridian limits can be set by using this excellent tutorial created by Chris which explains exactly how to do it.
The important thing is the limits you set in EQMOD must be greater than the limits you set in SGP. So for example, if you set the “Minutes past Meridian to Flip” in SGP to 8 minutes, then your limits in EQMOD must be greater than 2 degrees. Otherwise, EQMOD will intervene before SGP has a chance to do its magic. So really we’re letting EQMOD act as a safety net in case SGP doesn’t flip properly.
Its also important to mention in a tutorial (as Chris did) that the limits must be set carefully so that your equipment doesn’t strike the tripod. So just choosing whatever limits and settings that are shown in your tutorial could lead to disaster. For example, in my case I set the limits in EQMOD to be VERY BIG… like 1 hour past the meridian, but its fine for me because I have a short OTA and nothing is going to collide if SGP should fail to flip as expected.
Thanks @DonWalters. That makes more sense than my first guess… I didnt event realize you could drag those markers. I’ll get a draft together for the official help file docs tomorrow and post it here.
