Guiding Crashes - bad Meridian Flip?

[Eric Brotman]

hi
Trying to understand if guiding is going bad due to Meridan Flip not working in NINA.
Recalibrated  PHD2 with the assistant.

 https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_B3XD.zip

Best

Eric

[Bruce Waddington]

Judging from the guide logs, the meridian flip isn't happening at all.  You can see this for yourself if you use the PHD2 LogViewer tool.  You started a guiding session at 00:59:26 from side-of-pier west with a starting hour angle of -1.49 hours.  That means the mount will track to the central meridian in 1.49 hours, which would be just before 02:30 local time.  But the guiding ran continuously for 2 hours and 48 minutes, so the mount was counterweights-up for nearly an hour - you were basically tracking "upside-down".  I think you should dedicate some time to get this sorted out while you are still up and near the scope.  Just choose some arbitrary target that will cross the meridian early in the night and figure out how to configure NINA to do what you want.  Also, watch out for any meridian tracking limit restrictions that are configured in either NINA or the mount controller.

Going forward, it would be nice to avoid alarmist subject lines about "crashing".  "Crashing" means something pretty specific in the software world - it means the application stops running, its windows are closed, it has essentially suffered a fatal error.  None of that applies here, you are simply having problems of your own creation and things aren't going well - in other words, nothing really out of the ordinary for us.

Regards,

Bruce