SharpCap Forums

Hello Robin,

It would be niffy to have a radio button in the Scope Mount Controlls
For toggling force meridian flip.

Reason being these days, most ASCOM controlled mounts have long since dealt with the pier-side stuff.
So, in an imaging session if my target is East of the meridian, I typically in EQMOD enable force meridian flip.
That way I am pier-side EAST and my counter weights are going to be RA'ing downward.
It is a work flow thing...
If I plate solve and do not toggle the force meridian flip in EQMOD while still EAST of the meridian.
The result is the sync result of plate solving flips the OTA to pier-side WEST.
Thus my counter weights will end up way above the OTA as I sideral further WEST of the meridian.

- mark

Hi Mark,

let me check that I'm understanding this correctly... You are deliberately forcing the meridian flip for a target still east of the meridian, so that you start imaging that target in the flipped position, and can continue from there until the target sets, since you are 'pre flipped'.

I can see that sending a sync or slew command to the mount when it has been forced to the 'wrong' side of the pier could end up pushing it back to the correct side of the pier, since the code in the ASCOM driver (or the mount handset) will look at the co-ordinates and decide which side of the pier it needs to be. Unfortunately though, I can't see anything in the ASCOM specification that would let me override that behaviour.

The things I can do via ASCOM are

1. Sync the mount to an RA/Dec co-ordinate
2. Slew the mount to an RA/Dec co-ordinate
3. (some mounts) cause a flip to happen without changing co-ordinates
4. (some mounts) find out which side of the pier the mount would goto for a set of co-ordinates before slewing to them

Given that, I'm not seeing a way to change the current behaviour, which is a shame

cheers,

Robin