Still getting to grips with Meridian flip using EQ8 mount and 12" RC telescope with ASI mini guide camera....
Imaging run last night with Meridian Flip expected at 2.06 which is 2h after target crossed Meridian as defined in Mount setting. Indeed this happened and stats show it occurred as expected with the necessary steps: flip plan: guide suspend, mount slew: mount track: re- align: guide calibrate(I think) : guide suspend: refocus: start guiding: next capture.
Problem was post flip images exhibit wild guiding. Please see pre and post flip images attached. I would appreciate if anyone can identify the issue and confirm which settings control Meridian flip and guiding as I may have missed something?
I have noticed possible bugs:
1) If guiding (internal guider) fails for some reason it can leave the mount tracking at a non-sidereal rate. Is there a safety section of code that puts the mount to sidereal rate after a guide failure?
2) I find re-calibration of guiding fails with little or no movement of RA and DEC axes. I found if I re-booted the raspberry PI and re-started everything, with the telescope more or less in the same location, guiding calibration succeeds. It seems previous calibration in the same session messes up the second calibration?
Tonight I attempted to image the same target and watched the flip from the observatory. It looked good however the first image post flip showed the same wild guiding problem. I notice guide calibration after the flip align is quite short around 8 secs and looked wrong on the graph. This time I manually intervened and did a guide calibration which worked did an align and started guiding and then re-started the image queue and all was well again.
I now know the problem is guide calibration fails after the flip! I now suspect this is bug 2 I mentioned above. Help?