Thank you so much for posting this!  How did it ever occur to you to try disabling the Meridian Flip flag?

It is that which is the issue causing the west-east-west-east slewing in my EQ6R-Pro mount during polar alginment that I posted here .  Once I disabled median flip the alignment now executes normal and completes.  Now that I can get an alignment done I can add that I too am seeing a much larger error value than what I was prior to the update.  Curious.
 

Thanks for reporting it. Indeed, we do not have a mechanism in place temporarily disabling the meridian flip during polar alignment. Could you please be so kind and post the logs so that we can investigate it further?

Just one quick thought: if you add a delay of a couple of minutes to the meridian flip, the problem should no longer occur. The problem is - as far as I understand it - that a slew during PA happens to be very close, but before the meridian. And during the capturing etc following it, the mount crosses the meridian. If you have a certain delay for the MF larger than the time between two slews of PA, everything should be fine.

Hi Wolfgang,
Thanks for taking this up. Please find an analyze file attached.

I tried to activate logs and also activated the debugger. But the log directory is empty. I hope the analyze file gives you enough insights. I could download the session file if this help as well.

The current setting of my "Flip if HA>" if activated is 0.27 hours. I don't remember when and why I set it, but in the past PAA used to work ok and still does with Kstars 3.5.2 as I could confirm last night. Relevant with regards to your hint is that the setting is different to 0.

Maybe of interest: Bruce reported in this chain the same problem and he uses a EQ6R as well.
In case it is relevant: I have to slew east due to a roof inhibiting slewing west and use speed 600x. I start PAA in the initial park position. I haven't tried from other positions yet but just confirmed that 3,5,2 still works fine for me with the same settings.

Do you happen to know if the calculation of the PAA error has been refactored which might explain the different results between 3.5.2 and 3.5.6 (with meridian flip being deactivated on the latter)? I saw this entry about a major refactoring of the align section for 3.5.5. Unfortunately I couldn't use PAA in 3.5.5 as I was affected by the FOV bug.
Kind regards,
Alex

Hi Bruce,
Thanks for your input. Very helpful to know that I'm not alone. Interestingly you are using the exact same mount.

The problems you are describing with rotating forth and back are exactly the same that I observed. Only when I had a bit more patience yesterday to systematically analyze what is happening I noticed that a Meridian Flip is being reported during PAA. So one of the things I tried was to dectivate what I consider is triggering the Meridian Flip in KStars/Ekos after trying a number of other things.

When deactivating the flip in 3.5.6 the error I see as a result from a PAA run is different about 3' to what it gives me in version 3.5.2. Not so far off but hopefully the development team could confirm if there has been a change which could explain thus and maybe the new version is more accurate.

With the alignment adjustments I did based on 3.5.2 I made some test shots (with 3.5.6) of M31 (knowing well that clouds will stop me) and achieved a total RMS in the guiding of around 0.6" which is the range I usually target for. So the 3.5.2 guidance for the polar alignment of the mount has been surely not too bad. I ran out of time to adjust the mount in line with the 3.5.6 PAA results to be able to compare as clouds rolled in....

Kind regards,

Alex

Hi Wolfgang,

Just curious: are the logs I posted in the topic I linked above of any use here?

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense.
I've had my EQ6R-Pro carefully situated in my backyard for quite sometime and since I got such a good PA I've been very very cautious to not disturb it. On those nights that were clear enough I'd first check the PA and it has been holding very well. Then I did an update on Stellarmate and everything (seemingly) went nuts.
Lat night, after seeing your message, I disabled meridian flip and voila: I could use the mount again. Did the PA check and it was off by a lot, just a shade over 3 degrees in Altitude.
I did not do the thorough analysis you did and thus have no idea if that was just coincidence or not (instead just corrected the PA and happily continued).

Yes, helpful, it indeed shows that the mount detects that a meridian flip is necessary immediately after the first slew had completed. And I'm afraid it shows that the idea I had above won't work, since in your case the HA was +6h, i.e. far beyond 0 of the meridian.

6h? (!). Ugh, I guess I better pay attention to all the settings after doing an update.

I think the Idea was to set the value to delay the Flip beyond the movement needed for the polar alignment to supress that the flip is being triggered. But that would not be a value that is helpful for the actual flip in the end. I could though try to start at another angle so the Meridian would not be crossed.

Seems like the code changed on the way between 3.5.2 and 3.5.6 so the condition set for the flip became relevant. But just for the EQ6R?

And this still not explains the difference of about 3 minutes in the reported pointing accuracy when comparing the two versions.

When your mount is permanently placed, do you have the chance to compare to another software as benchmark? I need to set up the mount for every session.

Thanks,
Alex

Gesendet von meinem STF-L09 mit Tapatalk

I just got some new SDCards, I'll have to burn an original Stellarmate image to give that a try. Weather permitting of course (which it has not been most of this year, ha!).

I also had this problem and still having it.
Using another EQMod mount - HEQ5.
Starting with 3.5.6 beta I believe. Windows client.
Just one or two times.
Today I updated to 3.5.7 beta (Windows client) and had this again - system was trying to do meridian flip while doing polar alignment.
Rebooted, disabled "Flip if HA>" and this helped.

Never had this with versions prior to 3.5.6.
Thanks!

Hi all, 

tonight I experienced also this problem. It was my first session with KStars 3.5.6 (PPA) after upgrading from 3.5.5. I have KStars + INDI on a Ubuntu Mate 20.04 x86_64 box, and use a AZ-EQ6 (eqmod) mount.

In my case, I run the PA assistant using the guide camera/scope for faster refresh (my imaging camera is a slow CCD), but this seems to have no effect over this issue. The PA assistant captures and solves the first image, then does the first slew. After this slew the UI went somewhat crazy, "Capture&Solve" grayed out and reenabled in a loop. In the Mount tab in Ekos the coordinates were "jumping" although the mount wasn't slewing. Then I noticed that it was reporting Meridian flip, pending, running. First thing I did after cancelling the PA was purge the configuration of eqmod and set it to the defaults (it also was updated along with KStars and some other INDI modules; in the past I once ran into problems with configuration files of updated drivers). Not to avail. Then, I disabled "Flip if HA>" (which I always had set to 2 deg) and re-run PAA and everything went as normal (as I read now that the other posters did as well). 

Before KStars 3.5.6, this never happened to me. I will try to retrieve logs later to see if they help.

Best Regards,
Sergio