Meridian Flip Advice

General
1

Hello All,
Up to now, I have never run a sequence which involves a flip. Today, In the warmth of my living room I hooked up my kit as a simulation to see what will happen.

In SGP I used the V2 camera simulator and I had my NEQ6 Pro hooked up as the mount. PHD2 beta 4 was used with it’s camera set as ‘Simulator’, ‘On Camera’ for the Mount and 'EQMOD ASCOM HEQ5/6 for the Aux Mount. These settings are saved in SGP as a profile so it loads the simulator settings automatically when SGP connects to PHD2.

I picked an object close to the meridian in Stellarium, threw this into the F & M wizard, framed it and created a sequence.

RUN…

The flip happened but when SGP resumed the autoguider the RA trace in PHD2 quickly moved off the screen and resume failed eventually with the simulator star leaving the screen and then tells SGP the guide star was lost etc etc.

Is this expected when PHD2 is using a simulator for a camera, is this only going to work out under the stars with real camera’s ??

Would anyone be willing to tell me how to go about confirming I have correct settings in SGP and PHD2 to successfully perform a flip mid sequence and be sure that autoguiding is going to react the correct way for my equipment ?

Many Thanks for any Help/Advice

Paul

2

my guess is that you will be fine out under the REAL stars. PHD (after a flip) will “find” a suitable star to guide on , assuming you have that option checked in PHD and assuming your guide scope/camera can find one. I would strongly suggest that you track a few degrees PAST meridian before you let SGP do the Flip. Just make sure it is super safe to track past the meridian so as to avoid any mount crashes. You also have to have SGP do a centering routine because after a flip she will be quite a ways off from your original framing .

Dennis

3

There’s no need to check any option in PHD2, it should all just work automatically. Testing with the phd2 simulator won’t work, you’ll need to test it under the stars as Dennis said.

Andy

1 Like
4

Cheers Gents,

Ill give it a bash next time I can get out

Paul