My first Meridian Flip went pretty wrong last night and I'd like to ask whether I'm doing anything obviously wrong in EKOS settings.

I set up to capture the Veil Nebula which was almost overhead at the time. The OTA slewed so that its axis was pointing due west and the OTA just about vertical. I took some test shots using a laptop connected over nomachine and all seemed well. I retired indoors to create a sequence of 60x20s subs from a desktop PC & nomachine. I ran the capture and a few minutes later saw that capture had paused after 8 subs and the message box said MF was underway. As I hadn't seen this working yet I zipped outside to watch it. 

What I saw was the OTA/mount was stationary, the OTA was pointed vertically down, axis pointing west and the USB cables to the OTA (for camera/EAF/dew heater) were wrapped tightly around the mount. I immediately powered everything off and to untangle the cables I had to rotate the OTA 540 degrees. Looking at the control cabling between the two halves of the mount its also possible that the whole mount had rotated from west through east and back to west. Fortunately as the ZWO is small it seems the OTA/Camera did not strike the mount.

I don't have any logs as they weren't enabled at the time, but is there anything obvious that anyone can see I'm doing wrong please ?

The equipment is: Ubuntu 20LTS with kstars-bleeding / Explore Scientific iEXOS-100 mount / ZS 61 with field flattener / ZWO EAF / ZWO 178MC / no guiding.

I will try to simulate the same during the day today with log capture on and watch whether the same happens.

Read More...