Hi,I have always been an enthusiast user of kstars.

However, last night, things failed horribly.I wanted to use my new ZWO EAF and I started the imaging session with a refocus of every 60 minutes.When I checked my setup in the morning I saw my camera was stuck on one of the tripod legs, even though I had configured kstars to return to home position on the right time.
However, kstars had crashed so the mount kept on going. I am still not clear if there is any damage but I am very concerned

Moreover, even though I think the refocus worked (looking at the logs), no more pictures were taken after the first refocus.I am attaching the logs here and also pointing to the core dump .

This is on astroberry with kstars 3.5.8 stable and indi Code v1.9.5.1-6-gfd391d51b. Protocol 1.7.

Hi Paul,

When kstars crashes typically the mount continues tracking which ultimately will lead to the optical train crashing into the mount as the in built protection in kstars is no longer running (e.g. meridian flip).

The way to avoid this is to use protection built into your mount (if your mount supports this) and / or configure watchdog. Watchdog is a separate program that monitors a heartbeat to kstars and if that heartbeat stops (e.g. when kstars crashes) it takes action. You can configure what action to take but the simplest is to park the mount (which will also knock mount tracking off).

If you google "kstars watchdog" you'll find info on how to set it up. You can test that its working in daylight quite easily.

Hope this helps a bit.