Managing risks around mount striking pier

[Spookyer (Brett)]

Hi all, I am trying to reduce risk around my AP mount hitting the pier while imaging overnight while I am asleep. I am currently using NINA software to control all my gear and it seems to work well. I use the “set tracking” command with a trigger command in the sequence to stop the mount tracking at a certain time or when the target gets below a certain elevation. This works well. The problem is that if something happens during the run, like a power failure, software crash, or computer crash the software is no longer in control and the mount just keeps going and you don’t find out till the morning.

Short of getting up to manually check all is ok are there other ways of managing this?

Tonight I am testing setting my mount hand controller to stop and then using NINA to sidereal in the hope that if the PC is cut off from the mount the mount will stop.

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

I generally choose my targets and set up the sequence such that a meridian flip will occur around midnight-ish. I will typically stay up to make sure this happens successfully, and once that has occurred I can go to bed knowing that if I subsequently lose power or have a pc crash or whatever and the mount just keeps tracking, that when I get up in the morning the mount is still hours away from pointing at the ground and potentially hitting the pier.

i also have mount limits set in eqmod so that if nina stops/crashes but eqmod is still running that if I reach the horizon or meridian limits and nina hasn't already taken action that the mount will go into park.

[By.Jove (Jove)]

Don’t know about NINA but if you used ASIAir you can set it to home the mount at the end of the imaging run, switch off tracking, and shut itself down. It also handles flips fine.