Paul replied to the topic 'One of those Losmandy nights' in the forum. 1 year ago

Jacob,

The mount safety limits should be set for your own setup with everything installed on the telescope. By slewing and centring the telescope you will be able to see when the camera touches the mount. At that point you should back off a bit and set that limit. You will need to do this for both sides of the meridian and then set the western go to limit.

The instructions to do this are here Setting Losmandy Gemini 2 Safety Limits .

Now, to set INDI you need to understand how the limits work.

If you are outside the safety limits and command a goto that does not cross the limits then it will go there without a flip.
If you are outside the safety limits and command a goto that is outside the opposite limit then it will go there with a flip.
If the telescope is tracking and reaches the Western Limit it will not perform a slew.
When the telescope is tracking and passes the Western limit - Western Goto Limit but has not reached the Western Limit and a goto to the current position is issued it will perform a flip.

So INDI needs to issue a slew to the current location when the mount is betwen the Western limit - Western Goto Limit and the Western Limit.
This is expressed in degrees but I prefer to think of it in minutes.
Unfortunately INDI does not allow you to enter a range where it should issue the slew command.
With INDI you enter when the slew should be issued, which should be the number of degrees or minutes after or before the Meridian and should match the Western limit - Western Goto Limit value (with a small allowance for matching the mount with INDI).

When INDI knows the mounts has reached the specified position it will command a slew if it is not capturing an image - and that is important - it waits for the capture to finish.

When the capture finishes it will issue the slew command.
This should work as long as the Western limit has not been reached - but INDI does not know this, it assumes it will work.
It really needs a range to work properly, so that it can determine if it will work - I have detailed this in a previous post.

So, for it to work reliably you need to try and have as large a Western Goto Limit as possible. In my case I needed to buy a pier extention for my tripod to raise the telescope enough that the legs did not interfere with the camera.

Paul

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