Strange Star trails

[robindurant]

  Star Adventurer, Canon DSLR  - Williams Optics ZS61 Telescope  ;; I am getting double and treble joined up stars when imaging when imaging only at 60 seconds. I have carefully balanced the Mount and Scope and polar lined well. I have been advised that it is cable snagging but I have no cables.  Ive tried various movements of the weights and scope, It is a heavy duty Tripod , weighted and on anti vibration mounts, It is though the mount is badly tracking and taking multi shots joined together, My 2 test images are a full one and it zoomed shot at 45o alt East.  Am I asking too much from this mount, I would like to track at 2 mins

 

[Demonperformer]

The directions of the trails are different in the two big images - the first one seems to be in the 8-2 direction while the lower one is about 11-5. Does the startracker suffer from PE? Might be worth doing a PE trace (full moon is a good time to waste spend time on this).

[SteveNickolls]

Hi, don't know how you have your equipment set up but could it be your set up is too well balanced and at some point the load is acting with the RA instead of against it giving a toppling effect in some exposures?

Cheers,
Steve

P.S.

And this may be interesting to you- https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/610712-star-adventurer-double-star-problem/

[dph1nm]

Here is an interesting link https://www.star-watcher.ch/equipment/measuring-periodic-error/ which suggests that you are going to notice trailing after about 20 secs at your focal length. Having said that, looking around the web the reported PE of the star adventurer varies wildly, and the one in the link seems particularly bad. So you are probably going to have to measure it for your own mount.

NigelM

[Davey-T]

The first Star Adventurer I had did this because it wasn't tracking fast enough to keep up with the stars, kindly replaced by FLO with one that worked perfectly.

I'll see if I can find my post.

Dave

[robindurant]

 I have tried altering the balance as Sub Dwarf suggested and Davey-T I am using a newly replaced unit as the previous one was worse  - Demon[erformer, I put the wrong image on but it shows that the trails differ in direction when alter the weight/ balance etc . I will look up the link.