Failure to Slew to Target

[Ronald Crouch]

Hi Bob,
Last night at 7:11 UTC (2:11 local) an image completed successfully and Scheduler started another. The image which completed was NGC7280 which had transited at 11:03 local so was well to the West when completed.
The image which was called by Scheduler was NGC598 (m33) which crossed meridian at 2:14 local. Bad luck with timing?? As i mentioned in my last post my flip preferences are set for this telescope:

When slewing East to West... and also When slewing West to East...
Mount Flip 0.0 minutes both before and after meridian.

When tracking... (only to protect filter wheel on rotator from pier in the 40 to 50 DEC range with this OTA)
Mount can track -7 minutes past flip point
Mount needs 4 minutes to assure flip

I awoke this morning to see the ACP slewing light had been flashing since 2:11 am though I'm pretty sure the mount was just sitting idle pointing straight up. The only way out was to connect SkyX to mount and ask to point at something a bit East. After that I could run shutdown to park dome and scope and close up. In the ACP logs you will see for m33 that at 7:11:46 UTC slew to m33 started and ACP sat patiently until I aborted at 13:05:17 UTC.

I have never seen this particular behavior in years of use before and the only thing different is my changing the mount can track past to a negative number. Setting up APCC is a bit witchy to me I admit. The AP and APCC logs are huge (~93mb) but 31 compressed.. This is the 2nd time in a week the exact same thing has happened though last time it was at a pier flip for NGC7280 as the mount was stuck at dec +58.

My suspicion is this problem lies on the APCC side because that is what has stopped the mount. The AP/APCC logs are too much for me as I do not know what to look for and there are entries every ms. Is there a path to sort this out? Maybe Ray has sage advice. Funny because last 4 nights were perfect all night with multiple flips etc.

Best,

Ron