Hello all,

I have bee using astroberry fora few months now with a star tracker. I upgraded to an HEQ5 and have been trying to figure out how to do a meridian flip. Last night, I was imaging the Veil Nebula and was expecting a meridian flip around 1am. The flip occurred but something went wrong. I attached 2 images, the last exposure before the flip (veil.PNG) and the first image after the flip (noveil.PNG). As you can see, the mount ended up pointing somewhere else.

I have tested this functionality indoors by pointing to something just east of the meridian and checking the flip checkbox in ekos. The flip is attempted but it ends up no where near where it should. In my test, I started near DRACO and ended up near CYNGUS.

My routine is usually 1) set up mount. 2) add OTA. 3) polar align. 4) slew to target. 5) plate solve and sync. 6) setup phd2. 7) start imaging.

If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

From what you describe I deduce that you use the hand controller to slew to the target, then use plate solving to sync the mount and then use the hand controller again. This is possible but why not use the “Sync and Slew” capabilities of Ekos? That way, Ekos will keep on instructing the mount to slew to the target and verifying that it is pointing there with plate solving until the target is within a certain limit (30 arcsec by default) from the center of FOV.

Using that will undoubtedly solve your meridian flip issue. Now you should do the same procedure using the hand controller to center the object again after a meridian flip.


HTH, Wouter