Notes

9th July 2022 I recalibrated PHD2 on the EQ6R-Pro last night which worked fine. I then successfully guided to an acceptable standard. Unfortunately high cloud affected to whole evening’s imaging so only a few poor subs were captured across both the scopes. At the moment I am putting recent guiding woes down to poor transparency. To be monitored however and I will run PPEC at some point to see if guiding is improved further.

8th July 2022 After careful rebalancing of the mount and accurate polar alignment something very strange happened last night which lead to the abandonment of the observatory session on the Cave Nebula. First surprise - the guiding was poor with an RMS of 1.2" - 1.5". Second surprise - after running a Guide Assistant which suggested a re-calibration, the calibration failed continually with errors stating that backlash analysis was impossible due to the star not moving sufficiently. There were no obvious cable snags and in a stable environment where nothing changes I have yet to work out why this is occuring. The next clear night (tonight) will be spent troubleshooting rather than imaging.

On a positive note the Askar FMA180/ASI294MC/AZ-GTI combo worked beautifully on the Cygnus loop with sub-arc-second guiding at times (see image above). Quite amazing for such a small mount. There was one small issue - at the start the sequence failed to centre the object and I had to stop the sequence, run a framing assistant and then restart. Again no cable snags occured and the question remains, why did this glitch happen? To be investigated.