I had several unsuccessful meridian flips this past week (ekos said it was starting a meridian flip, it re-aligned, re-started guiding, restarted captures successfully, but I found that the OTA stayed on the same side of the mount). I was not running in the scheduler, but rather with a job within the capture tab. Luckily, I checked my mount the first time this happened and caught the issue before anything "crashed". I was careful after that and always checked to see if it had flipped.

To solve this, I took a shot in the dark and changed the test for meridian flip in the mount tab to "HA > 0.2" and then watched two more meridian flips, and all worked great.

[Previously, when the meridian flip checkbox was in the capture module,I believe the default for flipping was for the HA greater than a small positive value.
The default now (in the mount tab) seems to be HA = 0.]

My guess is that because of some slight sloppiness (probably on my part re time or lat/lon or some-such) the mount decided not flip sides on the slew issued for the meridian flip, since it thought the OTA was still on the correct side of the mount. I'm guessing that defaulting to HA > 0.2 or something similar would fix that. Also, I think it would a rare case where going 10 minutes past the meridian would be harmful, and a much more common harm could be caused by missing the meridian flip altogether as had happened to me.

Hy

PS My setting for HA > 0.2 doesn't seem to stick on reboots. Can I get Ekos to remember this setting in my mount tab?

Hi Hy,

Ekos doesn't actually issue a meridian flip command but rather a goto (or slew to) command as soon as the HA condition has happened and it is not taking an image. If the meridian flip actually happens depends on the mount and the meridian flip setting of the mount. If the mount, for instance, is set to perform a meridian flip only with HA > 0.1 and in Ekos HA is set to > 0.0 then the meridian flip will not happen. I hope this explains why the meridian flip did not happen with HA set to > 0.0.


Clear skies, Wouter

Thanks Wouter.

Yes, this was my understanding of how things work. However, you say:
" If the meridian flip actually happens depends on the mount and the meridian flip setting of the mount."
But what is that setting? I cannot find such a setting in the Indi driver, and when I look in the Atlas Pro mount manual, the best I could find is this:
nimax-img.de/Produktdownloads/51933_2_AnleitungSynscanEN.pdf (see page 13, section 5.6)

To set the meridian flip mode, go to Setup\Flipping Mode.

• Scroll to Auto Flipping and press ENTER to let the hand
  control decide automatically whether to perform a meridian
  flip.
• Scroll to Force Flipping and press ENTER to force the
  mount to perform a meridian flipping for the next GoTo
  object only.
• Scroll to No Flipping and press ENTER to prevent the
  mount from performing a meridian flip¬ for the next GoTo
  object only

So there is some control via the handset, but not exactly control over when the mount will decided to change sides.
It does imply, though, that ekos/Indi could send a command to the mount to force flipping on the next goto, which would make the overall system much more reliable (only one system keeping track, unstead of needing to coordinate HA parameters).

In my case, I think I've found that setting "Flip if HA>0.2h" in the Ekos mount tab fixes my issue.

Thanks,
Hy

Yes I agree that the Orion SyncScan settings are not very useful. But good to see that you managed to solve the issue in Ekos.


Clear skies, Wouter