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Old 05-07-2020, 10:26 AM
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The_bluester (Paul)
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Kilmore, Australia
Posts: 3,342
I would go further than Rob has said about reliability. There is nothing inherent in the EQ5/6 and related mounts to prevent them doing automated flips reliably, you just have to get the settings right.

For SGP I needed to widen the default pointing limits in EQMOD (This would have applied to Voyager too) or it would hit a meridian limit during the flip process and fail (It is likely a lot of people do not turn on limits in EQMOD so they would not run in to this one, at the risk of an equipment crash at some point) as soon as I widened the limits, reliable flips.

Voyager, I would have needed to set the wide mount limits for Voyager if I had not done already while I was using SGP. Voyager also behaves differently, where SGP stops and waits for the target to cross the meridian Voyager images through it for a time that is defined by the user, in my case, about 20 minutes after the meridian triggers the flip. If a sub is underway at that time it will run as far as 30 minutes after the meridian to complete the sub before aborting it and flipping. Why waste a sub in the best part of the sky?



I had to delay the flip a fair way past the meridian in Voyager due to foibles of a cheap mount. I originally had it set to flip at 5 minutes after the meridian, the cone error in the system (and ALL mount/scope combos will have some amount of it) would result in the plate solve returning a position east of the meridian and when Voyager syncs the mount position after plate solving EQMOD would reject the sync and then the plate solved pointing fails operation fails. I checked how far my gear could safely go past the meridian (About two hours in the worst case) set EQMOD to stop the mount about 30 minutes before that for safety and set Voyager up to flip no later than 30 minutes after the meridian. Perfectly reliable flips since then.


It is just a matter of understanding how your mount and the software you are using behaves and sorting out settings to suit.
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