Was writing up a reply in another thread to talk about steps that help find the moon (compass calibration/extreme leveling) and then went out to double check it and immediately discovered a problem, and I think I know the cause and a potential fix.
The moon seeking algo raises the scope to the altitude of the moon (which is why leveling is so important) while aiming a bit right of where it should be (why compass needs to be calibrated) and then sweeps left looking for a bright spot that is the moon, or even a bright edge that it can chase toward the moon. If it misses it'll go back and forth maybe shifting the altitude a bit as it does.
BUT.. because it's looking for light, it an can be confused by other lights (porch light, street light, etc) and start chasing that away from the real moon..
So I'm testing out my steps, and I immediately notice that there's a lot of light it the frame, despite there being no other lights in front of the scope. Dark sky and nearly full moon, nothing else. But what I see in frame looks like bad internal reflections or lens flare. The moon seeking algo chased this light off into oblivion ending up pointed nowhere near the moon (like down and 30 degrees left). I cancelled it and looked at the exposure setting realized that it was seeking in full auto so it was set to see the stars in a black sky, not the moon. This causes it to amplify the relatively dim lens flares to the point that it thought the moon was nearby. When I manually located the moon (sighting through the gap in the scope), the exposure immediately drops to a very low value.. like 1uS and gain of 5-10. Versus the extremely high values it was using before.
I locked the exposure then manually drove it off the moon and then told it to seek it again, and it immediately went back to auto exposure, and the lens flares showed up again, and it got lost, never finding the moon. I think this is a bug. Yes I think the exposure needs to be a bit higher while moon seeking so that it can chase the off axis glow of the moon when it sees it on the edge of the frame, but at full auto it's letting in way too much light so is confused by the relatively dim lens flares of the moon itself.
The fix for this would be to set an upper limit on the exposure while moon seeking, that's still pretty low. That's it.
It's pretty obvious when you cancel the moon finding, and just manually lower the exposure, the lens flares (or reflections) just go away.
