Freddie

Worth the wait.

I was on a bench 3.5 miles from it. You didn’t miss much !!!

Odd that the lodestar will not do short enough exposure what are you controlling it with?

Is the prism in the correct way? ie not back to front

You can't do both. If you align your cam to get the framing you are happy with then that is the alignment you will stick with. If you want to align the cam with RA and DEC, align roughly by eye and then with the cam set on a couple of secs exposure, move the mount in RA. Look at the sub and adjust the cam until you have a horizontal line. Repeat for DEC until you have a vertical line.

Good to see you back on the horse (or should that be cow) with DSO imaging Stuart. That's a nice result for your first of the year and I know conditions weren't the best for you on that night. Looking forward to seeing more.

Ah, with you now, sorry ignore what I said. The way you have described it, the mount would think that everything was perfect as you slew to a star (or at least where it thinks the star should be) and confirm that the slew is correct by just accepting it without making any adjustments. It would therefore think its map of the sky was perfect. Unless it gets a command to move DEC the DEC co-ords shouldn't change as it just moves in RA. Will need a bit more thought!!

The star alignment just gives the mount a map of the sky and will have no impact on its ability to track. A lack of polar alignment will cause your DEC drift.

As it is just tracking using the RA drive the mount will still need to be polar aligned. How are you doing that?

Aggression is a percentage so 3500 doesn't sound right. Are you sure you adjusted the correct setting? 3500 sounds more like a max duration setting.

True but the OP is clearly new to all this so I don't think the lack of auto guiding should be something to bring up at this stage as a tracking mount will be fine for some initial work and I wouldn't want to see the OP put off getting started.

The two guide graphs are actually pretty similar. They are not showing the same scale. You are arc sec and Olly pixels. If you take Olly's average being 0.05 pix and convert to arc sec it is ~0.5 which is pretty much the same as yours.

See reply to your same question in software. Hope it helps.

That's some useful information there. Thanks for posting. Would be interesting to see how wavelets compare to deconvolution. I believe you say you get finer detail with deconv. that wavelets wash out?