Focus vs. meridian flip anomaly

Sequence Generator Auto Focus
1

I had an interesting event take place with SGP 4.5.0.1460 around the period when a meridian flip was to take place.
In a nutshell:
1- An active 5-minute exposure was nearing completion seconds before the ‘Time to Pier Flip’ arrived.

2- The exposure completed and SQP went into a focus routine (refocus is set for every 30 minutes).
During the focus routine (and before the meridian flip was initiated), a small cloud passed by the telescope FOV which caused the focus routine to retry twice before finally completing. By that time the ‘Time to Pier Flip’ displayed a value of -04:00 minutes pass the meridian.
Instead of SGP initiating the flip after focus was completed, it went back to exposing the next frame. I figured I would wait to see if that exposure (5 minutes) would complete but about 2 minutes into the exposure the mount eventually initiated a meridian flip on its own while SGP was still in the exposure phase. Of course, PHD started alerting during that time, but SQP was still exposing.

3- I manually aborted the session to let the scope complete its flip. Afterwards I manually initiated SGP to plate solve and then resumed the session. It ran fine for the remainder of the night.

It appears SGP may need to check when a meridian flip is nearing and to postpone a schedule refocus until the flip.

Mike

2

Do you still have logs for this session? I just can’t find anything that would cause SGPro to ignore the flip if Auto Focus were initiated just prior. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one… just that it’s not immediately clear and logs would trace it.

Also, checks for flip always come before auto focus checks. In this case it seems the next frame may have started mere seconds before flip and invoke AutoFocus. One thing you may consider is using the option to automatically pause the sequence and wait for flip if the next frame cannot be completed in time.

In any case, there is no scenario where the flip should be ignored.