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Mafze

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  1. I can't really comment on the difference between AZ EQ 6 GT and the EQ6-R, but I can tell you some of my experience of the AZ EQ 6 GT since I bought mine beginning of 2017. First, when reading different threads on this mount when I considered buying it in 2016, it stood out that there were large differences in performance of the mounts out of the factory. I decided to go for a vendor with a documented expertise in characterizing and tuning Skywatcher mounts. Since I am imaging in France, I went for PierroAstro that has a very good reputation. I discussed with them and told them I wanted a particularly good example as I wanted to do fairly high res imaging (I’m now at 0.9”/pixel). PierroAstro always checks, tunes and measures the periodic error, and at delivery I got a report with a measured PE curve showing a smooth curve of about +-7“ peak-to-peak oscillations. My own measurements of the PE has confirmed this several times. If you can get your Skywatcher mount from such a vendor I think this is much preferred than buying a mount that is coming directly from factory without any check. I now have a permanent setup, with a RC8 on top, and if seeing permits I normally get a RMS of 0.6-0.7” on the RA, and 0.5-0.6” on the DEC. The guiding has been extremely stable since I bought it 4 years ago. The periodic error as measured from the frequency analysis tab in the PHD2 logviewer shows a main peak at a period of 480s, as expected for this mount. Below you see a particularly good guiding session, but my normal performance is only very slightly worse: As for the “auxiliary encoders”, I quickly turned them off as they really reduced the accuracy of larger slews. They appear to “resync” the mount after large slews, and platesolving sometimes failed due to a large initial offset (PlateSolve2). Since turning them off I always has the object close to center on my sensor (Atik460ex), and platesolving always centers in 2-3 iterations to below 20 pixels. As I only image I don’t see the use of them. As pointed out they can easily be switched off/on from EQMOD. I did also experiment with PEC under EQMOD for almost a year. It worked very fine, as I could strongly reduce that peak at the 480s period as measured from the PHD2 log. But, after long testing I could simply not see any improvement on the guiding on my particular mount, probably as the PE is pretty low to start with and guides out easily. So now I simply run without PEC. So generally I’m more than happy with my AZ EQ 6 GT, but I would strongly suggest to get a mount that has been checked in terms of PE by the vendor, not to end of with a particularly bad example of the mount. Mikael
  2. Hi, A short announcement for those using SGP and wishes to more closely follow/analyse the autofocus routine after a nights worth of imaging. Since a few months I've been publishing a Autofocus Logviewer that opens SGP logfiles and presents graphics of the AF runs logged in the file. The program can also extract temperature shifts of the focus position from the logfile. If you are interested, here is the SGP forum thread: http://forum.mainsequencesoftware.com/t/sgp-autofocus-logviewer/ The latest software version can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/sgp-autofocus-logviewer/ Having read and learned a lot from this forum during the years, I hope to make a small contribution. Cheers, Mikael
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