Jay6879

Thank you all for the tips! Batteries aren't an issue as everything will run off 12v from my car, but I hadn't thought about the slow cool down and warming back up, especially for the dslr. Now let's see just how brave I am tomorrow night..

I would be using the 12v accessory in my car, dslr would be powered with a 12v to usb step-down like I always have!

Will a dslr, asiair pro or my eqm-35 pro mount be damaged by using them in such bitterly cold temperatures?! I'm itching to get back out and image!

19lbs! Your guiding "issues" are to be expected but the fact you can still images with that amount of weight on it is still impressive. The last few nights I gathered 9hrs or so of data on ngc7000, I hope not dithering doesn't mess anything up, next time I'm out ill give it a go.

That's still quite impressive that it can handle it, you've got over 15lbs loaded up right? Does the eqm dither well? It was a nightmare on the Star Adventurer so I never bothered with it. Actually no I went for the eqm-35!

What sort of exposure lengths can you get with your setup?

To be honest I don't want to rock the boat. I marked off where everything was that got me these numbers two nights in a row so hopefully going forward it can continue to be replicated. If anything pops up I'll start tweaking things!

Update So in the end I decided to take my chances with the eqm-35 pro, I've had two nights in a row with it and I'm very impressed so far. It's well built, the alt/az adjustments, for example, are light-years better than the Star Adventurer. Both nights the guiding was phenomenal... This was after two hours of guiding, the average was under 1" rms. There were a few times it peaked to 1.2"-ish but quickly corrected. Last night I felt comfortable enough to sleep while it imaged and I captured almost 5hrs worth of data, and since it plays well with the asiair pro when it was done it parked itself and shut off. Thus far, with the equipment I have now, this has worked out very well. One complaint is both axis are quite stiff, it can be hard to balance properly though I must be doing something right if I've got guiding numbers like that?

This isn't mine, but I'm curious as to what it all means. Should the lines ideally be 90° from each other on the cross hairs? What do the circles represent?

It's awesome that these products like the eqm-35 and iexos are available. Not everybody wants or needs a huge setup. Could you imagine 20 years ago Celestron or Meade having their software be open source? It's a great time to be into this hobby.

I actually was looking into that mount, actually the upgrade one with the pmc-8. It's about $200 more but I dunno, the whole thing seemed really flaky. While I'm all for open source stuff I'm not sure I want that for my mount control software. I don't have a tablet so I wouldn't be able to use it anyways! It requires a tablet WITH an SD card for some reason?

Well my telescope is only 61mm and with all equipment is around 7lbs so I guess I'm within the weight boundary with this scope eh. The only other scope I could imagine picking up would be a Mak 90 to get in closer to planets or dso's. Turns out Skywatcher says it can handle up to a 127 Mak... But beyond weight limits and portability is cost. It's like $500 more for the next step up from the ewm that I'm just not willing to spend right now. That's why I was curious if there was anything else in the same price range that would rival the eqm. Regardless, that's a fascinating picture showing all the different eq mounts. Didn't realize there were so many!

What the hell synta. This is ridiculous. So not only are there all sorts of rebranded models, the name changes based on country? https://telescopescanada.ca/products/sky-watcher-eqm-35-mount-s30500?variant=32811968331856 This is the one I'm looking at. Apparently the "M" stands for modular. It can be turned into a star tracker as well.

Huh, that looks like a rebranded eqm-35 though. Even the specs are basically identical! Did you mistake the mount I was inquiring about for something else? I get what you're saying, I just meant double the payload capacity of the Star Adventurer on paper, 11lbs vs 22lbs, though I don't plan on getting near the maximum no. I have a new Zenithstar 61ii (360mm) that I've barely used and there seems to be a huge amount of objects I can image before I decide to move on to something else. And even then I'd have to be careful because it needs to be as portable as possible. Right now all the equipment I use adds up to around 7lbs. I will read up about the heq5, weight and cos, thanks for the suggestion. What are the issues with the dec axis you are talking about?

It's around $980 here in Canada, is there anything out there that surpasses it in the same price range? I have a Star Adventurer 2i currently, the eqm-35 would double the carrying capacity and add go-to. At the very least the extra automation would increase efficiency quite a bit. No longer would I be manually finding objects, let alone the bonus of having a motorized declination axis. I'd love go for something larger but my setup needs to be as portable as can be. Typically I'm driving out somewhere to image so I setup and tear down every single time. It's a bit concerning to be looking at a goto mount like this at this price range, I instantly think crappy performance, but I've read some people having good experiences with them. The fact that it's described as an "imaging platform" is certainly enticing. So lay it on me. Is there a better mount in this price range? Would it perform better with guiding than the Star Adventurer? Does it work well with the asiair pro?

Well, dss detects hundreds of stars when I go to stack so I should be fine then eh. I appreciate the help.

I've started to shoot the north america nebula but it's quite high up in the sky already and because I have a Star Adventurer there is no proper meridian flip. Eventually the gear will crash into the tripod and I'm not sure how the mount would handle such a thing but I don't intend to find out! I'd like to set it up and just run while I sleep. As it stands my dslr is rotated 90° left, so it's essentially on its side, and starts off fairly far to the west side of rotation. If I flip everything around so the telescope/camera are starting almost upside down (where it could easily run all night without crashing into anything) I'm afraid the framing won't match. I've got a few nights worth of data where my camera orientation is one way, and I'm worried if I pre meridian flip they wouldn't line up. How would DSS handle this?

So something was wrong, what it was I'm not sure. So I go and check the mount and...nothing. There is no noise at all out of the motors. The mount has stopped! Why though? Battery voltage on the mount shows nearly full power. Balancing was good, cords weren't snagging as they'd been taken care of. I didn't understand why it stopped. So I started searching around on the internet to see what's up, I googled "star adventurer mount suddenly stops tracking" and after pouring through a bunch of random results I come across a post asking essentially the same question. The answer boggled my mind. Turns out when you use Star Adventurer 2i in APP mode, whatever settings are in the app AUTOMATICALLY GET APPLIED TO THE OTHER MODES ON THE DIAL. So if you use the built in intervolemeter in the app and use say, 10 exposures at 2 minutes each (for a total runtime of 20 minutes) once the routine is finished the mount shuts off. I had used the Star Adventurer app for the super fast slew speed in the mount controls, though I couldn't remember if I had used the intervolemeter portion after getting the Asiair Pro. Regardless, this had to be the reason why right? Right?! A wave of excitement washed over me with he fury of a thousand sun's. I performed a factory reset on the Star Adventurer and set about tracking again. Here is the first image and plate solve at the start of the post factory resetted Stwr Adventurer.. I won't bother posting every five minute intervals, I'll skip right to the end.. This is nearly 45 minutes of tracking! It didn't deviate beyond 10" the whole time. By this time I was feeling quite satisfied that I had possibly figured this out so I started guiding.. There was thin layer of high altitude happening but it was still tracking good. And here is another screenshot of the tracking around a half hour later... It was putting up better numbers than when it started, and these numbers here were well within reason to allow 5+ minute exposures at 360mm of focal length (inhad done this before). At this point I was burnt out and packed everything up. So to sum up, The Star Adventurer 2i will copy all of it's settings used in the app onto the modes on the dial. For some reason. I'm not sure why. And as far as I could this "feature" isn't documented anywhere in the manual for some reason. I feel like I want to scream this from a mountain top, or have a stickied thread of something because this nonsense wasted so much time. So much frustration. I'm sitting at about a 95% confidence level that this issue has been sorted out. I think the other 5% is residual ptsd from weeks of failure and dejection. I won't feel completely satisfied until I can image again (Sunday it looks like) and can manage to get multiple hours worth with no issue. Stay tuned though, this may not be over! (oh God I hope it is). I'll check back in here after my next proper imaging session to tell how it went. I just wanted to thank everyone who replied here for tagging along during this saga. You've been very helpful and have filled in my gaps of knowledge. I'm going to keep trying to learn more on how to read these graphs beyond the basics, though it still feels foreign to me! I appreciate all the info that has been provided here, even on the periphery. Stuff like tips on balancing or cord management. I've learned a lot.

I have been methodical for weeks! And finally...finally I think I got it.. Well sir, it appears we have both come to the same assumption here about the mount turning off. Are you ready for this? I apologize for the length of this and the images but I do believe I figured it out. Buckle up for this nonsense.... So last night I packed up the laptop and all my gear. My plan was to first let the mount run untracked and see what would come of it so I set all my gear up exactly like I do down to even the section of sky where I have been trying to point the telescope for weeks. Trying to remove as many variables as possible and keep it consistent. So I triple polar aligned again and took my first preview image and plate solved it. Every five minutes after that I took another image and plate solved it again to compare coordinates and see the difference. Image overload incoming Here is my first exposure taken I won't post every image after five minutes as it's redundant, just know that the deviation in coordinates was less than 10", well within "acceptable" periodic error and certainly not enough to cause a star to get lost and fail the guiding. Here is the next exposure just over ten minutes later, don't pay much mind to the time I took the image at roughly five minute intervals! Declination has creeped up 18" and I'm honestly not sure if this is terrible or not (any insight would be helpful!) but I wasn't too bothered by it as I knew Dec was affected by polar alignment, the RA performance is what I was after. Essentially it would jostle back and forth 9" or 10" Something very interesting starts to happen 15 to 20 minutes since the tracking started.. It has suddenly deviated over 2m! At this point I'm like omg here we go, something is wrong with the mount. It'll need repairs or whatever. But I kept tracking and took a plate solve after another five minutes.. Oh boy..and after another five minutes here is my final test exposure and plate solve.. By this point it's obvious something catastrophic has occurred. But I didn't know what, all I knew was the tracking has now deviated well over 10m. This would certainly cause guiding to fail and the star to be lost. I'll continue in the next post....

Oh boy, this all doesn't sound very promising at all! No dew though, I have some dew heater strips. I haven't gone outside yet, its not quite dark and some clouds have moved in. Hoping they clear but this is my setup... Don't mind the taped but of extra weight, I've since changed the setup to something more elegant (kjnda) that allows much better balance, and obviously cords haven't been tidied up yet in the pic but that's essentially it. I wonder if anyone else has had issues like this? I've tried searching but it's such a broad subject to be searching. It may not be on the level of these crazy mounts and telescopes I see but it still was a half decent chunk of dough you know? Kinda crappy that it's such a pain. Well hopefully it clears out soon so I can run the guide assistant.

I'll check back tomorrow with whatever new data I can acquire then! As it stands I haven't hit a wall yet, there are still leads to follow so I'm not feeling completely done. There is hope yet! Almost as much as I just want to start imaging I want to find out what could possibly be the cause of this. Considering it happens in PHD2 and the Asiair Pro it kinda suggests that software isn't the issue. Ah well, let's see what happens tonight eh. Thanks for helping me out here!

You were able to get sub 1" at 450mm on a Star Adventurer? That's awesome, something to look forward to then eh. I had set it to 8000ms as that's what I had read is a good match for the 120mm guide scope I have? Tonight looks stellar so I should be able to continue this saga, if I do the guiding assistant will there be a log I could upload here? I did a quick Google search and it looks quite complex. But I will give it a shot. I'll also let the Star Adventurer run on its own for 20 minutes or so and take screenshots of the Asiair to show any drifting, which I suspect there will be SOME considering the periodic error of these mounts. As for when the scope runs away yeah, if j remember correctly I could hear the motor going. I just can't remember if I heard the motor continuously humming away or if it was jn pulses or what. When you say this.. Could the RA runaway be due to the gears having huge manufacturing imperfections or something? Like I said before, I was able to use this thing just fine unguided and guided for quite some time before this issue popped up so I never gave it much thought.

I didn't get a chance to run the guide assistant last night as clouds came in, same with changing the pulse size. I planned on doing one run with everything default then another matching the pulse size I set for calibration on the Asiair Pro (8000ms). That is the pulse size you're are taking about correct? When I balance I point it in the general direction I'll be imaging, and it stayed in position yes. Maybe I'm ok with +/-5" cause the scope is only 360mm? Like I showed with the images I posted the other day, it still seems to be within a workable parameter. The whole time I was sitting there babysitting the setup and yeah I could hear the motors whirring away. Your last question I don't think I've done lately, beyond leaving the tracker running while I am focusing, or while I'm calibrating the guiding. The last time it would've ran like that was before I got the guide camera setup and I don't recall any major drifting issues at all. As for the graph up there, those two big spikes are strange, but like you said it recovers. Not sure what would've caused that, then randomly off to the right "star lost". Ugh.

I ended up using the new flash card. So I managed to get a bit of time out there before clouds rolled in. PHD2 was working very well, sub 2" for the most part. Test exposures looked good. The ten minute mark rolled around and the numbers were still great, I was ecstatic. Yet sure enough a few minutes later the numbers blasted off into the hundreds. Ugh. I having this burning fascination in me to image, especially after it working out so well earlier in the spring. I'm feeling quite dejected at this point, not sure where to go from here. This is the log PHD2_GuideLog_2021-07-22_203634.txt I've been reading up on how to properly interpret the log files, and I think I have a basic understanding but I really appreciate all the tips and opinions here trying to figure this out. I'd be completely lost! With more experience these things won't be so foreign to me. So to recap.. I've got new cords I've gotten better with cord management, no snags Fine tuned balance Double and triple polar align Asiair Pro and PHD2 both showing similar patterns with the issue When the guiding works, it works fantastically. The issue is why the guiding doesn't consistently work like it did in the past where I'd have it running all night and just sleep. Instead it fails at fairly repeatable intervals. All of my gear sits in a foam lined Nanuk case so I don't think anything is damaged. I'm feeling utterly dejected with this all. Watching the summer roll on by, all those sweet objects won't be there much longer! So at this point it HAS to be something mechanical right? Could the worm mesh adjustment screw being too tight or too loose cause this? That's my next step I guess, sit outside with an Allen key and adjust on the fly or something. I dunno, not sure where to go to from here. I hope that log file I posted has some info that could be gleamed from it. Thanks again everyone for the interest in helping me with this nightmare!

I dont have a log file of the latest (last night's) session as it didn't save one for some reason. The SD card holding the os was bent and damaged and had a bunch of errors when I tried to format it so I'm assuming that is the reason why it didn't save a log. It didn't seem to be drifting in DEC lime it was before, the two pics above of a 5 and 10 minute exposure show half decent dec. I polar aligned three times 😬 I'm not sure how to increase pulse size in Asiair Pro. Is that the same as the "aggressiveness" setting? I actually have that altitude adjustment screws zingin tight at all times, but it still allows some very stiff movement in altitude. That lock screw is so horribly designed. So much slop.