KStars - Ekos -- meridian flip fails and then loses target

[@SteveNorseman]

Hi Marcel, I have the same thing with my Ekos setup. Meridian flips don't happen, although I haven't waited as long as you have here. I end up aborting the sequence and telling the mount to 'Park'. I then re-start the sequence (which unparks and slews the mount to the target) but when Ekos goes to align, it fails every single time. The only solution I have found is to re-park the scope and power everything down (mount, camera, reboot the Ekos system) and then it works again. Definitely not optimal. I know that Ekos used to work perfectly, but cannot get my hands on an old enough version to test everything with. I'm currently running kstars-bleeding 3.7.0 from April 2024. (FWIW, v3.7.1 and v3.7.2 released during 2024 have the same issue.) I have NOT yet tried v3.7.4 (2025-01-01). One thing with your meridian flip - try changing the 'Flip if HA value' to something slightly higher than zero - say 0.1 or 0.2. This will stop Ekos from trying to do a flip when you're really close to the meridian. Cheers, Steve

[@marcelpost4052]

Hi Steve, thank you very much for your comments. I'm fairly new to ap but I'm determined to get this to work properly under Linux. I'm currently using AstroArch because of better driver support for my QHY camera, but ideally I'd like to be running Debian. Interesting you say that it used to work with older versions of Kstars, I might investigate that. My current workaround for the failed goto / plate solving after MF is to abort the sequence and using the Ekos arrow keypad to manually slew to where it needs to be. Someone on the AA forum suggested that the mount may also hold MF limits, which I haven't discovered yet. I'm also looking around on other forums to see if there are other suggestions that can point me to the real solution for this. It might be just a bug, in which case I'm more than happy to assist the KDE/KStars team with, but I haven't as yet contacted them as I still believe that it's me not doing things properly. I'll experiment with setting the HA to values just above 0 and see how that goes. I'll report back here once I have some further insights. Out of curiosity, what mount are you using?

[@SteveNorseman]

@@marcelpost4052 Hi Marcel, I install Kstars/Ekos directly from Jasem's PPA. Which is great for instaling the latest version but it does not keep older versions - so I can't easily download v3.6.9 to test my setup with. My plan for today is to install the latest version and test the meridian flip settings. I've tried looking at the IndiLib forum but it seems to be broken at the moment in that I can't load various pages (for example page 2 of a thread) or the release notes for the latest version. Sadly, the IndiLib forum has always been a bit lacking, in my opinion. My mount is an HEQ5-Pro, so certainly not a top-end or fancy piece of equipment. Cheers, Steve