Demands of guiding

[Imd]

I then wasted several hours on Saturday night due to guiding problems. I never experienced problems with guiding prior to moving house. I'm capturing more North Easterly targets rather than Southern Easterly ones and I have been having problems guiding in the DEC axis.
I seemed to have fixed the problem after several hours, although it still went awry every now and then. I wont know for sure without further testing.

I discovered that when there are problems with DEC tracking the setting may become automatically deactivated and so PHD assumes you never want to track in DEC again but this alone was not a fix. So I then fiddled with DEC duration after reading some tips on SGL. I did the following:

• DEC guide mode was set back to auto
• Max DEC duration (ms) was changed to 2000.
• Calibration step (MS) remained at my usual setting of 1500.
• Camera exposure setting remained at 1.5 secs

I wish I had kept the graphs. Before I applied the updates the DEC line would gradually move up and after the fix it would usually remain near the centre line but once both DEC and AZ did the splits with one going up and one going down. To fix the split I just restarted guiding on my guide star again. Its a bit frustrating because I would like to setup the imaging and leave it whilst I enjoy observing, looking at graphs inside the house takes away some of the fun.

 

• All this fiddling around with settings took me to about 2.30 and so I made some progress with M51 for about 1.5 hours. I wish I had more time. Its always nice to add an image so I have added mine
• 12x5 min lights
• 5x5 min darks
• 28 flats
• 800 ISO
• EQ6, SW 200P, CLS filter, cannon 1100D
• Stacked in DSS then processed in PS5

If anyone can spot a simple mistake or give me any simple advice I would love to hear from them?

Do you think that North Eastern targets should be any harder to guide then South Eastern targets?

Thanks for looking

Ian