I’ve had something strange happen several times: in a sequence, when arriving at the meridian, the “wait for meridian” dialog is displayed until it’s time, then gets stuck there. When I woke up hours later, I found the telescope about to hit the pillar because it continued tracking and no meridian flip done.
I couldn’t make the flip happen (button greyed out on count down), but I could abort sequence, then reset it, then start it again. Usually, when this happens, The “run end of sequence actions” dialog also gets stuck at the end of the night (after a restart of the sequence), but the actions are run.
I tried another system and both have the same issue after a clean reinstall of system and software. Both are dedicated systems. But it didn’t happen straight after the installation, it happened a while later.
When you got back to the scope was the “Waiting for Meridian” dialog still up? It sounds like it was. I know you mentioned the “Attempt Flip Now” Dialog was grayed out but do you recall if it was still counting down seconds?
One thing to look at may be the time of your PC vs the time on your mount. They should be very close.
I did attempt this locally and everything seemed to work ok.
I had the camera hit the mount while watching SGPro expecting a meridian flip that never happened until I forced it. Pondered. SGPro still had several minutes before flipping when the target was ten minutes past the meridian. Pondered again.
Wondered about the PC’s time and what SGPro uses to determine the time to flip. The PC sees the internet and therefore a time server only rarely, maybe four months prior. The mount started with a GPS receiver stuck in it so it had a good time.
Is there a way for the mount to update the PC’s internal clock?
AFAIR the counter was frozen on a random value. It wasn’t counting.
The PC ant telescope time are the same.
I’ve been running the telescope since and it hasn’t happened again. So it happened to me I think 3 times on 2 computers in a fairly short time, then nothing since. It’s puzzling.
Well I’m glad it’s working but not thrilled when things “fix themselves”.
“Best guess” would be that SGP thought you were past the meridian and the mount thought that you were not. Can you set SGP to allow your mount to track a little farther past the meridian before the flip? Assuming you have enough buffer time before something touches the mount. Even a minute or two may help to ensure that both SGP and the mount are in agreement about the position of the meridian.
I’ve been waiting for this to happen again. It has with the same symptoms and effects: the countdown gets stuck, the mounts continues until it hits the pier.
So I created a completely new system in a virtual machine and did a fresh install of everything. It hasn’t happened once in that virtual machine. So I’m thinking the issue is with a DLL somewhere that sometimes gets stuck (though nothing is reported in the event viewer). A graphics driver maybe?
The problem doesn’t seem to be created by SGP, but could be a conjunction of factors.