Three Point Polar Alignment: Issue with tracking when re-starting Alignment.

[Michael Ring]

I am using Three Point Polar Alignment plugin 1.5.2.1 and NinaBeta004

This issue is always reproducible

I do manual Filter Changes and do Polar Alignment with no sight of Polaris. For that reason I sometimes need a little longer to get proper Alignment.

I also often do Alignment in two directions because I have to do extreme changes and then re-start Alignment because I do not fully trust Azimuth Error (I clearly do changes but Azimuth Error does not change, but I see that Plate-Solving was successfull)

A major annoyance here is that #953 states that tracking is turned off after Polar Alignment, the problem is when you run Alignment multiple times Platesolving does not work because of missing tracking. I then have to switch to Equipment->Telescope to turn on tracking again and then to switch back to polar alignment.

It would help to either rethink #953, or to make sure that tracking is active when user pushes play in the plugin or to offer a button to re-enable tracking from inside of the plugin screen.

Or, at least show the tracking status on the plugin screen.

[Stefan B]

The TPPA version that you are mentioning is already enabling tracking when a telescope connection is available on start.

[Michael Ring]

Hmmm… I clearly saw yesterday in several cases platesolving fail with long stars, then I manually enabled tracking and things went back to normal. I am using eqmod, are there logs I could enable/check to see if there are cases when enabling tracking fails?

[Stefan B]

i have added additionally to also set tracking mode to sidereal besides just enable tracking for 1.5.3.0

[Michael Ring]

Finally I had a kind of clear night on my balcony, (Wow it took a month… had only one more night inbetween with clear skies…)

I once again had to restart polar alignment several times, it looks to me that the extra change you did fixed the issue for me, tracking stayed active during the whole polar alignment process.

So thank you for the fix!

[Michael Ring]

Yesterday I saw that there still is an issue.

When I u se the pre-selected Start Point then tracking is always started again when I do the alignment a 2nd time. However, when I re-start Alignment with a Start point provided by me then every time tracking is off and I have to enable it manually to be able to plate-solve

[Stefan B]

Tracking randomly being turned off is a driver level bug. TPPA calls a set to tracking each time and if the driver doesn't respond to it there is nothing more to work around. Finally TPPA has a toggle to keep tracking enabled when the alignment is stopped in the latest version.