Meridian flip support for Metaguide?

Sequence Generator 2.5 Features
1

I was just informed that SGP doesn’t support meridian flips for Metaguide. Is it possible to add this support? I was hoping to try it and it apparently does support flipping it’s calibration data.

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2

We’ll have to look into Metaguide again. At the time we implemented support for Metaguide it did not support meridian flips.

Thanks,
Jared

3

Thanks Jared, the developer said he’d do a shout out to you as well. Sounds like he’s added a few other things as well to include some kind of flexure compensation.

I just want to try out my new auto guider with it. I haven’t had one that supported metaguide before and it always intrigued me. The developer mentioned that he’d added the support for meridian flips but also mentioned SGP hadn’t caught up yet.

Thanks,
Chris

4

Anything new to report on this? I’d love to use Metaguide with SGP, but I need to be able handle meridian flips properly since I mostly image unattended. Does it already support dithering with Metaguide?

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nothing new. Frank has indicated that this is supportable by MG, but it is not very high on our priority list right now

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Hi. This is my first posting here. I have been using a trial version of SGP and will be buying it soon. So far it seems to work pretty well.

The latest version of MetaGuide should handle meridian flips with SGP seamlessly and you shouldn’t need to enter anything special in SGP. If you calibrate a guidescope with MG and click a few settings when you calibrate - then from then on you can guide on either side of the meridian and MG will be calibrated and ready to guide. It does require an ASCOM connection to the mount to know which side of pier you are on.

You also need to turn off and turn on guiding when you change objects - but that can be done with a script that gets invoked.

So - right now the meridian flip is handled and you can use scripts to do a few other needed things and it should work. These remaining items would be easier if they were directly integrated in SGP but I can understand they have other priorities.

If anyone is interested in getting MG to work with SGP they are welcome to follow up in the astrogeeks yahoo group since it is more MG specific - as opposed to SGP.

I believe SGP does a form of dithering with MG but I am not sure. Dithering can also be invoked with scripts called from an SGP sequence.

Thanks,
Frank

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7

Welcome Frank!!!

Peter (aka Peter in Reno from CN)

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Hi Peter - Thanks. Yes - I recognized your avatar.

Hoping to use sgp more in the next few weeks but weather will be a factor. So far so good, and a key element is the autofocus feature - which I think worked pretty well.

For guidescope guiding with meridian flip, everything should work now with MG but I haven’t been able to test it much. My main goal is to use it automatically with a pyxis rotator and oag - but that will require rotating the OAG on meridian flip. I know you, Peter, don’t use MG - I’m just adding to the topic.

Frank

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