bobequus

Whoops, one was turned. Log attached. Thanks. PHD2_GuideLog_2019-04-22_215509.txt

Hope I'm not too late to the party. I just ran into the same problem last night. While imaging M101, my image slowly moved out of the center of the frame and moved roughly south over about two hours. Sorry about the tiny PNG's. Great guiding from PHD2 with less than .4 error in RA and DEC. PHD2 told me polar align was off by 8.1' Guide star was round and un saturated with a 12-14 SNR. Guide time was around 4 seconds. Other than a lot of images with meteor streaks (Lyrid shower), stars are round and small. Scope is a Vixen 825mm AX103 on a SXP mount. Well cabled; no snags. Guide camera is a Touptek on an Orion OAG. Main camera is an ASI183 Pro Cooled. I started the night using APT with PHD2's dithering, but after about the fifth image, it hung up so I restarted without dither. One weird thing that occurred was when I decided to try a different star in the guide frame, my calibration did not work. After about ten seconds the graph lines would shoot off the chart. I re-calibrated and all was fine after that. I've been wracking my tiny brain and the only thing that I can come up with is that I was not using a star for the guide but something else that moves differently. Comet? I think it would have moved faster and I doubt I would have gotten a good round star. Asteroid? Are there any that you can see in high light pollution suburb? Geo stationary satellite? Maybe, but none showed up anywhere near that area when I checked Stellarium. On top of all that; what are the chances of using something that is not a star (or a hot pixel) for guiding? Gotta be a million to one. Any thoughts or ideas greatly appreciated. Bobby Sapovits (new to the list, and a former resident of the "other" Telford in Pennsylvania, USA)