I loaded the latest beta for the new imaging season and on the first night I had a peculiar problem. Just before midnight, it appears to have decided I did a user-aborted meridian flip and then ran the shutdown sequence. I was in bed! Night was clear.
Log files don’t show much and there is nothing unusual in the TSX ones either.
Has anyone else seen this? My meridian flip settings were as normal, which waits for the flip point rather than go early. TSX and SGP flip points were as normal (45 and 10 respectively).
I will try and stay up for the next session and directly observe what goes on. I’m using a new sequence, but an existing equipment profile generated from an earlier beta. I will double check everything too but I can see nothing untoward.
This seems like a bug… I looked for a long while to try and find what called for a sequence abort while waiting for flip. As you noted, it’s not clear in the logs. This entry here is when the sequence aborted:
Ken, this would be about the right time, just past the meridian and with longish subs.
I have never had this before - has the code changed around meridian flips?
A little. There was a bug where meridian flip “waiting” would not stop waiting if the sequence was aborted. This was fixed and it is the right fix. Unfortunately, something called for sequence abort while waiting and didn’t bother to log anything.
This build has better logging… Unfortunately, there have been some reports of it failing to start (due to another unrelated change). Either way, there no harm in rolling back.
just tried it - 220 fails to start up. I’ll roll back to prior beta (169) without any other changes to help verify it is the latest beta that is the cause…
[further update] - 169 doesn’t load my sequences - back to 213
thanks Ken - I’m doing the Veil nebula, it is not near the zenith. The only thing could be that I set up the sequence with the Mosaic Wiz and I had the rotate ‘on’. My rotator is set up as ‘manual’, though I have never tried it. I have turned off the rotate in the target setting.
223 will not start up - same issue with signatures.
One thing I did notice - disabling rotate in the target settings and then saving the sequence (as the * appears, showing it has been modified) - removes the equip profile name from the header.
Ken - there is something else going on. I think TSX has developed a problem. The 100-point model says it has a 4" RMS pointing error, yet the slews are a thousand pixels off. I think the meridian flip may have failed due to an exception from the mount where it refused to flip as the side of pier was confusing things.
I’m rolling back, re-doing the TPoint model and trying again. The error is only in RA - but location and clock are perfect… Just one of those start-up gremlins. When I have the mount pointing with 50 pixels or so, then I go back to the sequence. Quite obscure this one.
Regressed to prior TSX and SGP versions. While my home position is still off - TPoint and SGP target offset work to a few pixels and I had a full night’s imaging.
Will try going back to latest SGP beta and see if the issue returns.
@Ken
I have now confirmed that the original issue appears to have been TSX. For some reason the homing angle has slipped and the initial slew errors it was giving confused matters around the meridian. I was able to get beta 213 to progress through meridian flip last night without aborting.
I still haven’t found the cause of the TSX, or the remedy - but they too had recent daily build updates. I should follow my own mantra, if it ain’t busted, don’t fix it…
The issue was finally tied to hardware. Homing sensor on mount was playing up. The large error before the centring process in SGP stopped the mount doing the flip ( just outside the limits). Recall that one can only use the target offset centering with Paramount on account of TSX not liking external syncs. In this way the mount never knows it is pointing incorrectly.