iOptron showing incorrect LST (was: ACP wakes up with wrong LST)

[George A Silvis]

ACP wakes up with a different LST than the iOptron mount reports.
Mount is correct. ACP agrees with the mount on local time, RA/Dec.
But LST is different by several hours. Sometimes its as much as 10 hrs. And then sometimes something clicks and ACP suddenly agrees with the mount.
Different LST means it has latched on to a different lat/long.

I've checked the ACP preferences for the observatory and the value there is correct.

How can I quickly convince ACP of the true lat/long? Go through preferences is and the value is there is correct.

This is beyond aggravating as a good night goes to waste. With the wrong LST than the dome azimuth is wrong and the scope is blocked.
George

PS. One way to poke at the system is to connect to the telescope with the ASCOM Device Hub. That connection process/data flow is seen by ACP and it finally adjusts.

[Bob Denny]

Wow! That's a new one on me! By "wakes up" do you mean "when it is launched"? And is this after a reboot or ??? Did this "just start happening"? Or what might have changed to precipitate it? Is this on all AAVSO Net nodes or just one system?

ACP reads the system time, and the configured Lat/Long from the Observatory tab of Preferences, then starts calculating and displaying the LST.

I need a way to reproduce this. Can you reproduce it at will? What happens if you switch from the iOptron to the ASCOM Telescope simulator? Does it still happen?

One way to poke at the system is to connect to the telescope with the ASCOM Device Hub. That connection process/data flow is seen by ACP and it finally adjusts.

I'm sorry I don't understand this. Do you mean that, while ACP is connected and showing the incorrect LST, you connect the Device Hub to the iOptron driver and what do you mean "poke"? Whatever, that causes ACP to start showing the correct LST???

What is the status of ACP's Telescope setting "Inhibit sending date/time and lat/long to scope"? It should not hve an effect but I am grasping at straws.

[George A Silvis]

Hi Bob,

This has been happening on my own system, not the AAVSOnet scopes. And it has been happening 10% of the time I fire up the scope. I hit ACP telescope connect and cross my fingers. And sometimes its wrong for 2 minutes and suddenly fixes itself.

The other devices connected to the scope are all showing the correct LST.

By poke I just meant that I had the ASCOM Hub make a connection and I'm guessing the message traffic of that process catches the attention of ACP.

The geometry is that I'm using the iOptron ASCOM driver for the CEM 120 mount and maybe ACP is not happy with that. Serial and driver access traces are turned on so I'll wade through those to see what I can find.

Do you concur that it looks like ACP has a wrong lat/long for the scope? RA/Dec look OK.

George

[Dick Berg]

Different LST means it has latched on to a different lat/long.

Just a brief comment, George. If the sign of the longitude got changed (who know why...), then you would shift from UTC-5 to UTC+5, and that could account for a 10-hour shift in LST.

[George A Silvis]

Thanks Dick,
Good suggestion for a 10 hr offset. But the offsets are all over the place.
My suspicion is now on the iOptron ASCOM driver. But I don't want to solve their driver problem: I just want things to work!
Thx,
George

[Bob Denny]

George -- To isolate the problem, switch to the ASCOM Telescope Simulator .NET. Try 20 times. I'm going to bet that the problem never appears. Let us know the results.

[PS this is one reason I love ASCOM - it's easy to localize problems]

[Bob Denny]

George - I’m pinging this. May I close it or is there still a problem?

[George A Silvis]

I haven't seen the problem appear again, yet. I'm ready to pounce with screen shots and logs.

My work around appears to work: to connect to the scope with the hub.

The better solution may well be to use the ACP hub instead of the iOptron scope driver which has hub capabilities.

Thx,
George

[Bob Denny]

Phone call today, this turned out to be incorrect LST on the scope. Due to multiple problems in the distant past with trash LST coming from scopes, I calculate the LST internally from the Lat-Long and system time. I'm ashamed not to have asked him to check it either here in the thread, or for the first 15 minutes of the call. It was George who had the presence of mind to check it.

Moved to the non-ACP section.