Last night, for the first time, I found myself with my
AP-1200 “Emergency Parked” while I was using SKY CHARTS to position the mount
for a photo. When I happened to glance at the bottom of the APCC window, I
noticed that Tracking was turned OFF. It must have been sitting at its last work
position for quite a while. My first thought was that I had photographed streaks
from one of Elon Musks swarms in orbit. I assume it was the result of
“Loss of comms” CP4 time-out, with APCC – so the CP4 safely shut down the
mount where it was. There was nothing actually wrong with the CP4, and Unparking
it let me retake the shot, and run the rest of the night problem & error
free..
We have been advised in the past, that the Handpad is a
plain “send-only” comms terminal device, and doesn’t receive data from the
controller. However, I wonder if there is any other ( perhaps indirect) way of
the APCC realizing that it wasn’t being heard any longer by a CPx controller, so
that the control program could flash up a User Emergency Warning of this state.
Perhaps a CPx “mount not-ready” signal. That would save a long night of futile
imaging, when nothing is permanently wrong.
