Hi All,

I'm running Kstars/Ekos via an Astroberry installation (which I understand is quite outdated) with an EQ6-R Mount, using EQ-Mod, and have a torrid time with MF. I have it set to flip at 3 degrees past HA, however what happens is:

*Waiting for exposure to finish
*Meridian Flip Initiated < - - - - It does perform a flip
*Plate solving
*Slew to target <- - - - This is where the issues happen

Whatever I do, the mount will not slew to the target. It'll slew past it, but not to it, it feels as though there is a limit set somewhere that stops it however I have HA limits disabled on the mount tab. It generally happens close to zenith.

Is there another limit set somewhere that I can't see here? Would this be solved by migrating to the AstroArch distribution I've seen posted elsewhere?

Hi Justin,

There are HA and Alt limits. You mention no HA limits but do you have an Alt limit set?

Hi John,

Also no Alt limits set.

Hi Justin,

I have the same mount and have occasionally seen what you describe. It hasn't happened very much with me and certainly not consistency enough to get to the bottom of it. I always thought it was a slew problem rather than a MF problem and may be related to poor balance where in certain positions the mount can't drive the scope properly - but that is just a guess on my part as I have no evidence for this.

You could migrate from Astroberry to say AstroArch and get the latest the KStars and see if that fixes it - although I'm not aware of a fix for this (if its the same issue as I'm thinking of).

The other thing you could try is connecting up the rig in daylight and use the skymap to drive the mount to goto certain positions and see if there is a consistent problem in a specific part of the sky. Then you could try checking the scope balance in that position. If that's OK then we'd have to try tracking down something else.

Solid suggestions John, thanks.

I actually purchased the Stellarmate OS yesterday, so will experiment once I'm up and running to see if the issue is still there with a new installation.

Thanks for your time!

The symptom you describe proved to be scope imbalance in my case. It would do the MF and then it would get into this seemingly endless loop of slew and platesolve.

Thanks for the suggestions all. I don't think it's a balance issue as it happens regardless of the OTA mounted.

I have now upgraded to latest Stellarmate version and this seems to have ironed out the issue in any case.