Steenamaroo

My apologies - I totally over looked the eyepiece in your setup. Please ignore my totally useless replies. 😂

Ha, I just realised and was editing. Sorry about that.

Must be some mix up there - The attached image is 200x200px. Edit: Oh, you mean Mars is 8px wide. 200x200px is very small for a final image. I guess that's a pretty heavy crop but, still, that doesn't make Mars any bigger. 😛 Bolting your DSLR straight to the scope is called prime focus. I'm sure someone could do fancy maths but let's, for arguments sake, say that's like looking through a 25mm eyepiece. You probably want something more like looking through a 10mm or 4mm, for example, so you'll want to use a barlow, eyepiece projection, or a longer focal length scope, or some combination of the above. I don't have a lot of experience but I did recently grab an eyepiece projection adapter and give it a quick test run on Mars. Can't remember which eyepiece I used for this - It was just for testing and getting to know the gear, but I guess this is closer to what you'd imagined?

Thanks @alacant Certainly up for further improvement, although I'm very happy now, but I don't see either of those options. Are they PHD2 settings, rather than KStars/Ekos? I did take your initial suggestions about more calibration iterations and shorter pulses but things seemed to get worse. As I say there, out of curiosity, I went the other way with longer pulses to see what would happen and things started looking much better. I'm not sure if number of iterations made a big difference but certainly longer pulses was a key to getting a decent-ish looking plot and much better guiding, so thank you, either way, for pointing me in that direction.

Bit of progress this evening...! For some reason binning 1x1 works much better 2x2 and always has so I stuck with that. Decreasing calibration pulse duration seemed to make things worse so, to experiment, I increased it. That seemed to really help the shape of the guiding plot, so I kept increasing/testing/increasing testing. Under advice from @Danield06 I went with 2.5 exposure, multistar algorithm, and auto-star. Seems like a solid combination. Once it was running well I thought I'd subtly tweak some values to see if I could improve it further and found that increasing proportional gain to 166 did just that. In the end I had under 0.5 total RMS for about 5 minutes so I'm very happy with that. Many thanks to everyone who has offered advice, or encouragement!

Update : Seems goto speed is, indeed, set at firmware level. Seller sent me a service version of the kit settings app which allows the setting of max goto-speed. Default was 1000X. I reduced that and restarted and the issue seems to be resolved.

Not sure if I'm on to something or not but I notice that goto moves in both axis at the same time. If I attempt to move in both axis at the same time using the pictured motion control panel, or the seller-recommend synscan phone app, it does not work at 6/7/800X. Attempts to move N/E, for example, just move N. Attempting S/E just goes S. It seems like the E/W movement is attempted, at first, but just stops after a second, while the N/S movement continues. I've passed this onto the seller/manufacturer too, incase it's relevant.

You're quite right, particularly when it comes to things like tightening/loosing. How tight? How loose? That's much easier to gauge when you can feel it or, at least, see someone else do it. I appreciate your advice and patience. My indi motion tab is slightly different to yours (pictured) but please be assured, as much as this guiding saga is doing its best to make me look like an idiot, I'm familiar with the speed controls. I had previously been setting 'custom' to 300 or so as a nice balance for use when polar aligning and that worked as you'd expect. The max speed, set explicitly or via 'custom' is 800X, and slewing at 800X or less is perfectly fine. The issue is that when using 'goto' on a target the mount takes off not just at the highest list speed, but higher! Investigating it for a while I think I'm right in saying the stepper motors struggle and skip the most when both axis are rotating together which, I notice, I cannot even do manually at the highest user-speeds (6/7/800) using the pictured motion control panel or synscan app. Pressing and holding the NE/NW/SE/SW just results in travel on one axis - N, or S. Speaking of synscan app, I tested goto from there, while I had it open, and noticed that it also runs goto at these same higher speeds so that's making me think it's a firmware level thing? The seller/manufacturer suggests loosing the worms slightly to make things easier on the motors but I took a bit of time last night to make sure it was a loose as could be without introducing noticeable backlash. I think, perhaps, a video of me operating the worm shaft by hand, with motors removed, might be a good idea. Sorry folks, I know this deviates from the original post and issue - Hope that's OK.

Ugh. Packing up for the night. Can't believe I've fanally made some progress with guiding (not quite enough to guide) only to find that goto isn't an option. This is really starting to turn into a chore rather than a hobby. With the motors removed I can turn the large pulleys with my little finger, and the motor skipping issue even happens with clutches disengaged so it seems clear the motors are just weak. I sent an email to the manufacturer asking about the weak/high speed goto but unless he points me to a magic 'increase torque' button, I can't see much coming from that.

Negative. My kit's max speed is 800 (and works well) but goto always tries to operate much faster than that, no matter what I set in indi control panel.

I'll give that a go. Unfortunately I wasted most of the night thinking something was too tight or binding only to find out that ekos go-to speed is, apparently, not adjustable, and wants to go way faster than my motors can handle. Slewing anywhere at any (supported) speed is tip top, but go-to is a waste of time as it tries to go at 1000X, or whatever, and the motors just can't do it. I'll be back.

Guide plot is looking very different after tonight's tear-down and clean. Can't say guiding is any better but it certainly looks like progress.

I am (was) sorting freedom of movement...Holy crap, that was worth doing!? Backlash, however, was already as low as I could get it.

Thanks for that - That's this evening sorted! 😀

Alright, I guess I need to figure out how to do this, then. Thank you.

I suppose it's a question of how freely but that seems like conflicting information there. Releasing clutches and moving by hand isn't difficult, by any stretch, but to make a 130pds with canon 500d rotate DEC due to imbalance I'd have to shift the dovetail bar about an inch one way or the other. Does that description help to clarify at all?

Thank you for the clarification and suggestions @alacant Balancing is something I've found difficult - With clutches off both axis are quite firm and it takes a fair push to move either of them. They're not ridiculously tight feeling, or anything, but the it would take a heck of an imbalance for them to rotate as a result of it. As such there's a lot of guess work going on when trying to balance the scope/mount. Is this abnormal? Should clutches-off movement be less firm?

Thank you both for replies. I'm taking it all on board but this strikes me the most. "you have forgotten to move the mount north until the star moves before Calibrating" Forgotten...First I've heard of it. Is this something I need to do in ekos? I've read quite a lot of support documentation but never saw this. I have had very good RA in/out at times but dev is always a mess - Could this be the main reason? Another thing I discovered is that disabling dithering entirely seems to help quite a lot. I'm going to try tonight, weather permitting, with the settings suggested in PM ( Thank you @Danield06) and dither on/off. Choosing the best from that test I'll then experiment with reducing guiding rate slightly.

Got a break in the clouds...Here are some screen shots showing a typical guiding plot. I know there will be recommendations and preferred settings and, of course, I want to hear them, but please keep in mind I've tried every combination of exposure duration, image filters, and guiding algorithm, possible. Mount was polar aligned by eye, then by the alignment tool in ekos. It's damn close. I've tightened up everything I can think of tightening up - Belt pulleys are lined up nice and straight, and the belts are clear of the edges. Everything's tight as a drum, and the guide camera cable is cable tied to the main scope mount ring, so there's no possibility that there's any pull on the camera or anything like that.

Thank you for all that info. I really appreciate it. The EQ5 kit doesn't seem to be particularly well known but it's a belt-driven stepper motor kit. I think my mount RA gearing could be tightened up a little - It's not what you'd call loose but DEC is tighter, so I'll have a look at that today. The EQ5 kit motor mounting brackets are heavy enough but they don't lock snugly against an edge - You're effectively securing two sheets of metal together with a single nut + bolt so it's not unreasonable to think there could be some minute movement there. That's another thing I'll look at today. I had suspected the weight, and sail-like characteristics, of my 200p might have been contributing to the problem so I'm mounted up with a new (to me) 130pds now. Didn't actually make a difference under nice conditions but I expect it will be making my life easier when there is a very light breeze or whatever. Thank you again.

Hi @Danield06 Thanks for the reply. The plot is not even nearly orthogonal but I suspected it should be. I had been trying to find images or videos of other people's calibrations but struggled so thanks for confirming this. I'll take a short video of the calibration plot next time I get a clear view of the pole. I'm still very much doing trial and error so I haven't settled on an algorithm, but had been trying Smart, SEP, and SEP (multi). To be honest, the stage I'm at, changes in image filter, algorithm, and exposure, aren't making a tremendous difference. I can calibrate as described and guide reasonably well but I definitely still feel like there's something not quite right and I'm not getting the best from it. I'll attach screenshots and more info, as you asked, at the next opportunity. "Backlash measurement on" DEC backlash is measured during the calibration process - Is that what you mean? I had been deliberately picking a very bright star to make things easier for myself, so 1 second was adequate, but perhaps I'd be better testing with stars which require slightly longer exposure, as that's a more realistic real-use setup. Thanks again.

Well, it seems the main issue here was polar alignment. I used Ekos software alignment, made the corrections, and things are much better. The calibration graph still looks a mess but I'm not concerned now as I'm guiding to within 2 arcseconds drift when there's no breeze.

I'm starting to wonder about that. Has anyone here successfully guided with this kit?

Hi Mark, At this stage I'd take any option that works by, yes, ideally I'll be using serial. Yes, the mount is set as Skywatcher EQMod and, once connected, shows as EQ6 mount which is what I think it's meant to do.