Meridian Android

The mount decided to do a meridian flip, except instead of rotating it in the negative HA direction, like it normally does, it decided to go in the positive HA direction. It rotated the scope side of the mount toward the mount legs.

I tried well over a dozen stars, in all quadrants, intentionally trying to trip it up. All movements worked perfectly using straight gotos and forced no-flips. The only misbehavior occurred when I tried to do a force flip. In those cases, the mount did indeed want to send the counterweights over the top, instead of backing around safely and then just overaligning with the counterweights tipping high once on the proper (i.e. improper) side. That is too bad, because the force flip could actually be useful, if your target is approaching meridian and you just want to pre-flip and lead it through.

Meridian Android

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What I played with before is to do a flip before the meridian manually, and it sort of worked - viewed from the camera side, from the home position, I could rotate the RA axis counter-clockwise with the counter weight on the left side and above the telescope, and I think it would sidereal track just fine. But any goto command in that sky area would flip the RA axis back to the normal pre-flip position, with the counter weight on the right side. So, it would not be very useful if you had a sequence with a target and plate solving.

BTW, have tried to reproduce what happened to me last night? That is, a simple go to between two positions in the South location below the Equator. The first position is right before the meridian, and the second position is right after the meridian.

Yeah the mount should track just fine regardless of what side it is on or if the weights go up. I image past meridian without bothering to flip it all the time, as long as there's no camera to tripod interference.

The first read through I glossed over that you gave the targets and coordinates. So, much to the consternation of my cats, I plugged the mount in again in my living room. Not wanting to wait for Jupiter and Saturn to straddle the meridian, I just used a couple stars. Low ones too, since you said the planets were on the horizon (how far north are you?).

I picked Antares and Kaus Australis which straddled the meridian at about 11:30 my time sort of similar to your situation. I flipped between them repeatedly with the app, and the mount properly flipped east or west each time.

However, I don't think Synscan is doing it in the way that follows common sense. Instead, there's a little chart on page 33 of the manual that defines what it means by no flip and forced flip, depending on which side of the meridian the goto target is on, in order to go counterweights above the scope.

And the "forced flip" setting is for when both start and end targets are on the same side of the meridian. That would be useful if you wanted to image a target that will soon cross the meridian, so you would do the flip preemptively before imaging.

I have checked this version without telescope and it works! When the clouds go, Ill check it.

I suppose that the mount's travel after the meridian hasn't been increased yet, it must be done through firmware upgrade, right?

@Software@ZWO#59164 ajobacho mentioned tracking objects beyond meridian. This must be corrected in firmware, it's independent of ASCOM or anything else.

My mount tracks exactly 4 minutes (1 deg) beyond meridian, then stops. This should be increased, may be to 10 or 15min, for flexibility in performing flips while using long exposures. And this can be done in firmware only.

It would also be nice to add (maybe double) beep when mount auto-stops tracking.

I am in Pacific Standard Time zone, which, as of today is now PDT (God, do I hate this stupid idea of switching clocks back and forth, it is one of the dumbest ideas ever thought of) If my ASIAIR App is getting its time from the android time/date, will the mount also receive this info?

i am running ASIAIR Plus 2.1 with latest firmware.

Unfortunately, the meridian flip failed again tonight. The ASIAIR Plus was showing that the mount is exactly one hour behind DST, as it supposed to be. Guiding was near flawlessly, averaging about .4" on both axis. Imaging stopped 3 minutes before the flip was supposed to happen, as expected. But the flip didn't occur. All settings were correct, flip was on in both mount and and autorun windows. ff782bc1db