Starflyer

Can't you get a different focus motor that works with the feathertouch focuser? I think you'll find that any other solution, including the original Celestron focus knob, won't be as good as the feathertouch.

I have everything mounted on a perspex board with screw holes located so I can move it between my newt and frac as needed. I have one USB and one power cable going through the mount, excuse the messy cabling but I was traveling

Take a look here, it's a great thread about the QHY268M generally and worth a read.

Only deep sky or the odd bit of lunar

They collected it and replaced it quickly, my point is that it's sloppy and should never have happened. I love mine and wouldn't hesitate to recommend them, the optics are superb.

I've owned four OO scopes over the years, an SX10, 2x VX10s and currently a CT10, all with 1/10 wave optics, and I've loved them all. I've read the horror stories and personally know someone who bought a VX10 that had a bolt loose in the tube on delivery that had badly marked the primary. Their engineering manufacturing can be sloppy, their optics are hard to beat.

If an SCT is miles out of collimation take it off the mount, balance it securely on a table and look into the front of it from about 5 - 10m away. Get an assistant to tweak the collimation until everything is showing as concentric circles. In my limited experience with SCTs this is the easiest way to get them close, it'll still need careful collimation on a star though.

I'm not near my PC with N.I.N.A on it, but I wouldn't use the beta version, the stable version has everything apart from cutting edge changes. ASTAP, is far faster and more reliable at solving for me than PS2 or PS3 ever were. It has to be a setting that's wrong somewhere. The screenshot you show is the Framing Wizard, this doesn't show the options that you have set for platesolving, but I can't recall where it's setup without looking on my PC.

Thanks for sharing this here Leo. Quick questions; if I use the Guiding Assistant to improve PA do I need to recalibrate after each tweak to the Alt / Az position? Is it possible to use PHD2's drift alignment feature to help tweak the PA? Cheers Ian

I've been following this too and intend to try it when the sun gets higher and clears the house. I tried a few time lapse captures last summer and despite having decent PA (fixed pier) I was getting some drift over a couple of hours. I tried Sharpcap's solar guiding several times and gave up, I couldn't even get a consistent calibration. I considered a dedicated solar guider but they cost a ridiculous amount of money for what they are. I'm excited to see the results people are getting with this and I'm looking forward to getting some multi-hour captures with no drift.

There's a good strip down, tune and rebuild guide here for the Skywatcher EQ6, which is identical apart from the colour AFAIK.

I think the only way you can rule out the asiair as being at fault is to try it on a laptop. It'd be a shame to RMA it, be without it for a while, and then hear back that there's no fault found.

This may be related to your other problems. I have heard of an HEQ5 mount being fried when the outside of a power plug momentarily touched a tripod leg. I don't know enough about this and perhaps someone with electronics expertise will be along to explain exactly what happens. Essentially, you'd expect them both at zero volts, the negative on the power plug and the tripod, or in your case the camera body. But in some circumstances you can get a voltage leak that results in a difference in potential between various parts of the system, maybe the powered usb hub makes it worse, I don't know. Who are the electronics gurus here?

What desiccant are you guys using? If it's the originally supplied QHY stuff it may well be saturated already from sitting there for a year or two. This is what I'm using, 100g will last a lifetime, just store it in a small glass jar instead of the poly bag it arrives in.

I'm on the old driver firmware too btw.