Hi,

I evaluated CCDAP3 a couple of months ago, and love almost every feature of it.

I have a (hopefully) basic question: my mount (Takahashi EM200) can safely track past the meridian. When working with CCDAP3, what I see it doing is, if an exposure will cause the mount to track past the meridian, it will delay image acquisition until the mount hits the meridian. CCDAP3 then performs the meridian flip, and resumes imaging.

This is well and good for mounts that don't track past the meridian, but for mounts like mine I can see some lost imaging time (e.g., for narrow-band imaging where I sometimes do 30-minute subs: if an exposure is to start 20 minutes from the meridian, CCDAP3 pauses for 20 or more minutes until after the meridian flip).

The Meridian settings are currently the defaults. Is setting the Flip Delay by longer than the 1 minute default all I need to do?

Thanks,
Eric

Eric,

IIRC, you can set the flip delay to negative values to allow it to track past the meridian. If it is equal to minus the duration of your exposures, it will essentially be checking at the start of the exposure rather than the end.

Thanks, Steve. So it's a negative number, rather than a bigger number? Intuitively, a flip delay of +10 would hint at allowing the mount to track 10 minutes past the meridian, but I rarely trust my intuition, so...

Either way, if it possible to delay a meridian flip, that would address one of my last few issues so I can get off my duff and buy this once and for all!

Eric