MarkAR

Lovely colour moon.

I've got the version 1 of this for my photography and SkyGuider. https://www.3leggedthing.com/albert2 Claims 30Kg capacity. Not cheap but a beautifully engineered bit of kit.

Agreed, lovely shot.

A very brave attempt, well done. Cooled will definitely help as will guiding. How about using a 2x or 4x powermate?

Definitely picked up on more of the outlying dust halo. Nice one.

Very good indeed.

Here's another one. Draw a circle as close to the diameter of the spread of the tripod legs as you can, also mark the centre spot. Marker on the end of a piece of string and something tied the other end for the centre point. Lay a straight edge across the centre point with phone compass pointing north. Mark where it crosses the circle a north and south. Put the centre pointer on the north mark and draw an arc right across the circle. Move centre pointer to next mark and repeat until you have a six pointed daisy wheel. Place tripod on the 3 most appropriate points. Get kids to colour in the flower.

Well it could very well be the surface on the mount in the last picture it looks suspect. Ideally that surface would be machined perfectly square with the axis. I think if you try rotating the RA axis 360º next time you polar align and see at which point the star is furthest from the green circle. That might give you an idea of which side to either tilt the red holder or place a small shim under it. Then repeat the 360º ad nauseam till you're happy. At a guess it looks like a gap where the thumbscrew is on the right.

There was an idea on another thread that would help you. Basically use a strip of wood the right width that you can clamp in your mount about 18 to 24" long. Add a ledge at the bottom that your phone can rest on squarely (add rubber band for safety) and that should stop any interference from the mount with your phone. That should get you close enough to north that you can do a polar alignment.

I'm running EKOS on a Mac and it will only connect (USB to Handset) if PCDirect is enabled. EKOS set to EQMOD. I remember trying the other settings in EKOS linking USB directly to mount and couldn't get any connection. Wonder if it works through a Pegasus Astro or similar box.

Just realised you're looking to change the actual focus mechanism not a stepper controller.

The Celestron will fit. https://www.firstlightoptics.com/focuser-controllers/celestron-focus-motor-for-sct-and-edgehd.html

Is it the Celestron Motor focussed you've had problems with? What were they?

Cheers mate. Your loss of dithering might have been due to loss of the guide star but with the other issues I'm not sure. I plate solve local which shows it's using ASTAP.

You can get USB extension cables if that would work.

I'm just starting so all I've managed is hope and pray using Siril. It's free and works on Macs. It does have some automated scripts that make it easier.

Looks great, you've brought the colours up nicely.

Could be moonlight entering through the eye viewer.

I started tonight with EKOS giving me good focus, guiding around 0.8 RMS for the first set of subs (10 x 210s of red) then froze. Wouldn't change filter to go on the green and wouldn't take any subs. So its either very quirky or it's my laptop, new laptop tomorrow will hopefully solve my issues. Sounds like EKOS is confusing itself and our computers.

Big improvement, still showing faintly in a couple of places though. Best thing would be a strip down and clean, I think I need to do that myself going by tonights subs.

Really really great images, well done.

5 out of 90, ouch!

Little bit more screen size is also a bonus, KStars/Ekos is a little crowded on a 13". Going to hit the add to basket on a refurb one from Apple.

Put finger in hole of bearing, use finger of other hand to spin outer case as hard as you can. If it spins freely for a long time and you can hear it rattling then grease them. If it slows fairly quickly and is pretty quiet the it is already greased. You have the 2RS1 bearings, he shows the 2RSH. Different specifications.

Just had a thought, use Apple built in activity monitor tonight and see how much CPU and Memory is being used.