Starflyer

The solar image looks much better than the first one you posted, that was sharp bottom left and soft top right if you look closely.

As mentioned, a smaller step size should sort this out. Your V should have more of a rounded bottom than a sharp point.

4-5s guide exposures will be enough to hide the SDE problem. It will still be there, the mount hasn't bedded in and won't show in the image on short focal length scopes. If you do a run at 0.5s and analyse the error then the SDE spike will still be there. So long as you don't ever plan to try imaging at a longer focal length you'll be fine. It's not enough to give you oval stars at the moment, but SDE will smear stars at medium to long scopes.

Looking for one of these, maybe you bought one and now use a pier? My location is West Midlands, but open to you sending by courier if you have the original packaging. Cheers Ian

I have two Lakeside focusers, both are fitted to the coarse focus knob side and both have worked very well with SGP for the last few years. Backlash is very important, you don't need to get it exactly right, a higher value than your backlash won't hurt, better to have more than too little. What scope and camera are you using? Did you take any screenshots of your V curves, a pic can be very revealing?

Did you rotate the DEC axis by 90 degrees to line the hole up in the DEC axis? The polarscope is unlikely to be in focus when the mount arrived, on my mounts the eyepieces have all needed unscrewing a few turns to get them focussed. You can do this in the day by tilting your mount so it points at a distant object, but take care it doesn't tip over. Polar alignment can be done electronically, often faster and much more accurately, but not for free. If you're going to guide then PA can be done with a finder guider and SharpCap Pro, which is a cheap option.

Expanding anchors can split concrete quite easily. Chemical anchors are the way to go; drill your hole, be sure to remove most of the debris from the hole, inject two part epoxy and wind your anchor bolt into the epoxy.

I agree with David, the encoders are worthless for imaging and I'm sure they were interfering with my guiding. They're for visual use where you unlock the clutches and manually move the mount around. Have you got plate solving working in SGP? This will get you bang on where you want to be night after night. To use this you must disable the mount model in EQMOD by setting it to Dialogue Based and clearing out any existing alignment points.

I can't find the receipt email, but from memory it was armoured twin with 10mm cores. The run is only around 6m and there's no noticeable voltage drop, there must be some but it shows the same on the pier display as the battery display. I have it connected up to a 110Ah leisure battery and that's kept topped up by two solar panels (I have no mains power in the shed). Even in the depths of the UK winter, imaging for six to eight hours a few nights a week it hasnt dropped below 12v

Here's mine, I went a step further and ran a 12v supply from the shed, it makes setting up a breeze. 

My first thought would be to put a pier in your garden, attach your mount to it and get polar alignment dialed in. Leave the mount out and just throw a decent cover over it when not in use. This will cut down on your set up time considerably and allow you to get going quickly.

This is mine, designed in SketchUp, I had a local steel fabricators make it up for me. They hot dip galvanised and powder coated it for the grand sum of £120, zero signs of corrosion after four years. 150 X 6mm steel pipe with 10mm plate and M16 stainless nuts and bolts.

The Rowan mod uses a 47 : 12 ratio to maintain the same gearing as a vanilla mount. It's possible to use 48 : 12 but if you do this you need to set the custom ratio in EQMOD.

I thought you'd recently ordered an arm and a leg's worth of ONTC scope? Good luck with a Quattro if that's what you're after now

If your polar alignment isn't great then a target could drift partially or all the way out of the fov during a period of cloud cover. If you feed your PHD2 log into the log viewer app (separate download) then it'll give you an estimate of your PA error. If your PA is good then the tracking should easily keep your target roughly centered throughout a brief period of cloud cover.