FYI, I submitted a fix to the Polar Alignment Assistant (PAA) for an issue related to the rendering of the correction triangle. This fix is detailed in  https://invent.kde.org/education/kstars/-/merge_requests/198 and has already been merged into the KStars source code, though as I write this is not yet in any nightlies. This will likely fix the triangle-rendering issue reported by @rbarberac and also by Jasem. I'm hoping my fix from last week solved the east/west issue reported by @rugbyrene (and seconded by Jasem). Assuming these are indeed fixed, I'm not aware of other issues with the new PAA code (Jasem is looking at the "manual issue" brought up by @kengs).

While I was testing that fix, I ran polar alignment using my telescope 18 times over the course of an hour in several different ways:

  • rotating East, starting by pointing near the northern pole,
  • rotating West, starting by pointing near the northern pole,
  • rotating East, starting East of the meridian at about DEC=60
  • rotating West, starting West of the meridian at about DEC=60
All my tests went well.

I have a couple things to mention, not directly related to my changes:
  • I once got a "Solver Failed" during PAA, and when that happens, the system doesn't gracefully retry. You need to stop the PAA process, and restart it. I'd like to correct that, but it may not be right away, as I want to make sure this system works, and this state machine can be tricky.
  • I noticed that my system started up with 8x mount speed. Perhaps that was due to some debugging I was doing previously, but if you notice the slew going very very slowly, check that menu item on the polar-alignment tab.
  • I removed the "flip the correction vector" option. I don't think it makes sense any longer, and would confuse the interface. If you feel you need to reverse the correction vector, please contact me and I will try and fix the underlying issue.
Please let me know if you see any further issues.

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