Hi Peter, thank you for the attention to this case.
First of all, how do you point the telescope to zenith? If I press Z on the keyboard, the map view moves to zenith, but nothing is selected as a target that I could tell the telescope to slew to.
But so far everything, including previous responses here point to the fact that KStars indeed has nothing to do with any flippings of the mount. Instead, it does just 3 things:
- it tells the mount the observing site coordinates
- it tells the mount the local sidereal time
- it tells the mount the slew target coordinates
The mount then decides itself how to perform the slew. Keeping this in mind I am trying to understand what could cause the observed behavior and why I observed it with both my real mount and the simulator after that (also why the simulator started behaving "normally" the following morning).
The logs look like both the location and LST were set to the mount correctly. In fact, LST is being assigned multiple times along the way, such is the Temma protocol, apparently.
But your question of whether the meridian line is drawn correctly is a good one. Check this out:
The RA coordinate of the meridian line (below in the status bar) and the ST in the time info box above mismatch by more than a minute. And I am close to the maximum zoom possible in KStars here.
However, originally my problems with the mount started when I was trying to slew it to my photography target, which was still a couple of hours East of the meridian.
It is also the case in the video attached to my first post here. The slew target is more than 2h before the meridian, yet the simulator (!) goes around.