Sometimes this hobby gives me all the "fun" I can cope with ...

[Demonperformer]

Well, last night was another wonderful exercise in frustrating failure.  I am really starting to get thoroughly tired of failing to get anything like polar alignment on my mount.  I know there are going to be people who will say I should consider a permanent setup, but that is just not practical here.  Trying to attach webcam to the polar scope?  It just keeps falling off as I can't seem to sand down the connector bit I bought enough to get over the polarscope focusser enough - and if I do I will probably go too far and it will then fall off because of that.  Tried using Merlin's method last night, but was not successful with it (I'm sure that is me not the method).  And then to cap it all, the software started playing up.  AT would solve the first image, re-centre itself by about a degree and then totally fail to solve that image.  What's THAT all about?  Finally EQMOD stopped talking to the mount at all and so I could not even 'park' the mount at the end of the evening.

Spent this morning listing all my equipment and pricing it ready to sell on the second hand market if things don't improve soon.

Rant over.

Sorry about that.

I will try and keep my pity-parties to myself in future.

[RogerTheDodger]

I have a lot of that on the odd occasions I get out... sometimes nothing goes right and when I try it again the next day in daylight all works fine....

Eventually I wrote a check-list as I found problems so I could go through them quickly, and now problems are mostly delays rather than wasted nights. Not being able to have a perm setup is a pain but I managed to compromise by having a permanent pier in the garden and setting up on that each night I go out - this means that PA is pretty darned close just by dropping the mount onto the pier, and I let guiding worry about the rest.

Don't even think of giving up, you'll just kick yourself on the next clear night

[Demonperformer]

Thanks for the reply, Roger.

I have started looking at the possibility of a permanent pillar, but I am a little worried that it will just be a case of "throwing good money after bad".  Will see where my investigations lead on this one.

As for selling up, I was not getting the results I wanted from the ALT-AZ setups and so feel I need to get EQ working to move forward.  But if it is just going to lead to a series of disappointing failures of nights, I would rather save myself the heartache [and free up the cash that is locked in the gear].

However, one bright point has arisen from Tuesday night.  It seems that my new neighbour's father is quite an accomplished astro-photographer and she has promised to put me in touch when he next visits to give me some pointers.  So maybe I'll put off the quitting a while yet.