Hello Bob,

The SideOfPier property was in our understanding to distinguish between the both possible ways of tracking: instrumental declination < 90 and instrumental declination > 90. As this cannot be distinguished when looking at equatorial coordinates (where DEC is always < 90), the flag SideOfPier seemed to make sense.
Now, we saw in the conformance test program of ASCOM, that in fact the SideOfPier is ONLY related to the hour angle position. In that case, it seems to be totally redundant, as it
1) does no longer distinguish between the DEC > 90 / DEC < 90 cases and
2) can be reconstructed only from the hour angle value.
For our NTM-500 this is usually is not a big issue as it can track indeed one range of hour angles in pierEast and another in pierWest (as it cannot go over the Meridian). For our new NTM-1000 however, which is in our understanding still a GermanPolar mount, it does matter, at it can go way over the meridian, both for DEC < 90 and DEC > 90.

thank you !
Emmanuel