Notice the plate solves from the first meridian flip sequence:
2023/02/08 20:51:41 Solve succeeded: RA:6h11m11s DEC:+20°37'16" Angle = -142.264, Star number = 2545
2023/02/08 20:52:59 Solve succeeded: RA:6h11m11s DEC:+20°37'14" Angle = -142.28, Star number = 2570
2023/02/08 20:54:16 Solve succeeded: RA:6h11m12s DEC:+20°37'16" Angle = -142.296, Star number = 2576
Notice that the RA remains essentially constant, even though each of these three plate solutions were separate by 1 minute in time.
In 1 minute of time, a stationary mount should have seen 15 arc minutes of drift in RA.
The constant RA means that the mount is still tracking, or it has been moved there by a command.
I see autocentering happening in the log, even though the camera angle shows the mount did not execute a Meridian Flip.
There should not be any tracking or autocentering until the meridian flip has succeeded.
Is this another case of the phantom auto-center that we keep seeing in the past week or two (especially from people who complained that ASIAIR was autocentering even though they did not even connect a mount)?
In addition, has tracking been left on? (Unfortunately, the log does not show the tracking state -- perhaps it is time to add it to the log as a regression test).
This would also explain why the pier side is wrong, since the constant RA means that the mount has (dangerously) continued to track the target past Meridian without doing a Meridian flip. It is a good thing @greenstar finally stopped it all manually. If he had not done that, there will eventually be a slow motion pier collision.
So, two things that needs to be checked. 1) tracking is stopped untill Meridian flip succeds, 2) autocenter should not be issued until Meridian flip succeeds.
The other thing that will help debugging is to print the Local Sidereal Time of the mount into the log. We can then subtract it from the RA and find out if the mount thinks it is time to do a Meridian flip. HA = LST - RA, and HA = 0 when the target trasits the Meridian.
@greenstar the next time this happens, note down the LST in the hand controller of the mount. If LST has advanced past the RA, the mount should do a Meridian flip. Otherwise there could be some Meridian treatment that is preventing it from doing so. For example,, if you had set the Meridian treatment to allow tracking past the Meridian, then the ASIAIR algorithm for auto meridian flip timing will not work (at least until that amount of delay has passed).
Chen
