jjosefsen

I fiddled a good couple of hours with adjusting DEC and RA tension/backlash, seemingly it improved a lot.

The other night I had a go at M81 & M82 I was thrilled to see that the mount performed MUCH better, the images turned out significantlybetter than expected.

Im currently processing in pixinsight, this time with flats as well as bias frames, I have a lot of noise in the background im trying to deal with and a nasty purple gradient in the bottom of the stacked image.

Could this gradient be due to bad flats perhaps? Tonight I might try to stack it all without calibrating it with flats to see if that makes a difference.

Thanks again guys, good information here as always.

13 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

When tracking the mount always goes from east to west, if you balance it then unbalance it a little so the eastern side is a bit heavier than the western side it makes sure there is always a small amount of force keeping the gears in mesh giving a smoother drive.

That makes sense, thank you.

Loils like I will have to do the whole strip down thing after all.

6 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Try replacing the stock grease with white teflon grease, also adjust the backlash carefully and make sure the mount is set up a bit east-heavy.

Sorry if I'm a little dim ☺️East heavy?

I've been directed here from another thread I started with some questions related to EQ3 imaging.☺️

I've been testing the tracking of my mount, trying to find my retention rate at various exposures..

Had another test session last night. Tracking problems not solved..! ? still had more bad subs than good ones, about 40% retention rate.

Managed a pretty good polar alignment from the look of it. Mount balance looked good too, but still lost a lot of frames. The thing is, it looks like I lose the same amount of frames percent wise, when I'm doing 30 second exposures as I do at 60 second exposures..

I suspect it is the mount having uneven movement from sticky gears, does this sound plausible? All the trailing was in the same direction, RA axis by the look of it.

There were also small guests of occasional wind, don't think it had much effect..