Possible NINA Mount Control Issue - Forums

Topic starter

8 days ago

I connect to my Tak EM200 mount using The Sky Pro 64 and control my imaging through NINA. This has worked well many times with the same sequencer templates. However, last night I had imaged up to the meridian, manually done a meridian flip and then started imaging again. Images were to be collected through to astronomical dawn (about 5 hours). The first images after the flip were collected successfully. About 4 hours in to the run while the equipment was unattended the mount appears to have done an uncommanded meridian flip back to the east. This has resulted in a huge tangle of wires which I discovered in the morning. Thankfully the wires have stopped the camera crashing in to the pier and the EM200 clutch system has worked well preventing damage (I hope!!!).

What could cause such a failure of control?

I intend to set up a run tonight to take just one image after the meridian flip and then have NINA control the standard close down of cameras, guiding and dome while I watch.

Although I have had this one problem I think NINA is a great way to control your imaging sessions.

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Jeffrey Kieft

Perfect post

8 days ago

I’d recommend posting on the NINA Discord channel, the developers will see it there.

Quick question though, you mention TheSky as connected to your mount, but NINA is also connected to your mount (?)…if so, which is issuing the commands to the mount? I’m confused by the roles of the two softwares, which might be in part because I’m not familiar with TheSky.

Following up on this - you mention that you did a “manual” meridian flip - can you explain exactly what that means? Did you issue a command through the software to do a flip, moved the axes using a hand controller or software, or something else?

I ask because a hypothesis is that one of the two pieces of software connected to the mount did not know where the telescope was pointed, and responded when it thought it was was near a limit or the meridian. Was the mount synced to the correct coordinates in both programs, and was this maintained during/after the manual flip?

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Alex Nicholas

8 days ago

Definitely seems weird - are your location, time and date settings correct in the mount, the sky and NINA? Sounds like one of the 3 thought it was about to cross the meridan and did an auto-flip…

In any case..

A test. figure out what alt/az the mount was pointing at at the time (this is relative to the ground you’re standing on, not a geodesic coordinate in the sky - important in this case) Point the telescope 1° in RA from there manually, and then test the following:
With the mount connected to NINA only, start shooting an imaging sequence and wait 10 minutes. If it automatically initiates a flip - something is wrong in NINA.

If not, connect the mount only to the sky, slew back to the original alt-az location, 1° in RA from where the autoflip happened originally… Leave the mount tracking away for 10 minutes.. If the mount flips, something is wrong in the sky.

if not, same again, with just the mount on its own, tracking away… If it flips - the mount’s location/time/date are probably wrong..

If none of these trigger an auto-flip - sounds like some sort of freak bug/connection issue that caused the snafu.

Regardless of this test’s results, do not rely on cable snags to prevent mount crashes - enforce software limits in the mount so that it can’t point in crazy places - the mount will prevent itself from getting into a properly bad position.

Then tidy up your cables so that even if you tell the mount to go somewhere where a snag otherwise may have happened, you don’t end up pulling a socket out of a camera when a cable gets pulled tight at max slew speed!

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