Silly question: How do you deal with meridian flip?

[themos]

I've never resumed imaging after a meridian flip. I assume I need to reacquire the guide star and restore the framing in the imaging camera. Any gotchas that I should know about?

[James]

The only thing that's caught me out (well, so far) is that the image will be upside down once to reacquire after the flip. I forgot this whilst imaging an object and ended up imaging only the edge of the object...

James

[roundycat]

the smart answer is to avoid it like the plague. My approach now is to always image to the east until I can no longer 'see' the object and then go onto something else in the east. Later I might set up a complete night's imaging in the west and redo all the object's I'm interested in, remembering to invert the camera and set it square to the horizon when pointing at the meridian.

Dennis

[Vega]

I manually flip the scope before imaging so that the counterweights are already facing West then start tracking. Of course this means you cannot use goto to find your target and have to find it with the trusty finderscope or telrad. Also the target has to be far enough round that you can orientate the counterweights West without a scope collision with the legs.

It sometimes means waiting a little later in the evening to be able to do it but well worth it as you can keep the imaging going until the object is quite a few hours past the meridian

Matt

[blinky]

I think you will need to recalibrate the guiding application as it will now be moving the scope in the wrong direction.

[Vega]

I mean flip the scopes position before starting the whole session not mid way through.