Hi Bob,

I've been using TheSky 6 and TSX with ACP for a while, but saw something new (and dangerous) last night. In the morning, I saw that the run had stopped because of excessive plate solve failures due to clouds. The log reported this and said "shutting down tracking for safety". The drive had in fact not shut down, and the eastward pointing OTA had stopped at the hard stop limit (Paramount ME).

I successfully replicated this this evening by running a plan which took images of a cloudy sky. After the prescribed # of plate-solve failures, the log console said that the scope appeared to be lost and it was shutting down the drive. I watched as the green "Track" word and the sidereal tracking check box on ACP both disappeared for about 1 sec. and then spontaneously reappeared. I could hear the drive start back up as well. The tried this with both TSX and TS6 with the same result. I then altered my test plan so that it would end before it reached the plate-solve failure limit. At the completion of the run, the drive was shut down for about a second, and then turned on again.

I'm using the latest ACP/hotfix, ME driver v1.99, and ME firmware version 2.8.6, which is the latest. Any ideas? Thanks.

Don
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
08:39:30 63 catalog stars found
08:39:30 ** No matching stars found. Check your estimated center-point RA/Dec, and your image scaling and quality.
08:39:30 59 catalog stars found
08:39:30 ** No matching stars found. Check your estimated center-point RA/Dec, and your image scaling and quality.
08:39:30 **Script Error (Tracking has been stopped)**
08:39:30 Source: ACP Plate Solver
08:39:30 Message: **Too many failures to plate solve. The scope appears to be lost. Aborted. at line 1328 column 29.
ACP console log closed 14-Aug-2012 08:39:37 UTC