Meridian flip crash

I was imaging early this morning. I noticed on my cam that a meridian flip had occurred. I went right back to sleep. When I did get up, I found that SGP had crashed, and PHD2 was not doing anything. The log file is at:

Dick

From the log file it looked like it failed to plate solve after completing the flip and so aborted the sequence:

“Something has gone wrong when centering after the meridian flip, but recovery mode is NOT active!”

In your telescope settings in SGP do you have Park Telescope or Stop Tracking when sequence completes checked? That should stop tracking if the sequence aborts.

I don’t specify to park the telescope or stop tracking at the end of a sequence, as sometimes I do abort the sequence temporarily. I thought I had noticed in the log that the auto centering plate solve failed because the scale was not within 25% of the scale hint. I’m not sure where that hint is specified, but I wouldn’t think that should cause it to fail.

The plate solver takes the image scale from the “Scale” setting on the Camera tab - this needs to be set correctly for plate solving to work.

re: stopping tracking/parking: I always leave this enabled (for my AP mount) just in case something goes wrong - better to be safe and have the scope stop moving rather than have it risk hitting the pier. Of course, if your mount has safety stops, then you don’t need to do this.