Help with trailing stars

[drumsolo]

  2 hours ago, drumsolo said:

Hoping someone can help me work out what is going on with my HEQ5 Pro mount. 

Set up last night and I keep getting the same problem, trailing stars even without guiding and taking a 20 sec exposure! Never had problems like this, my Polar alignment was within 3 degrees.

It seemed worse when I was pointed south towards the beehive cluster for example but weirdly I did manage to get some good exposures of the same target when guiding for 3 minutes! Seems a bit random.

Here's the images, a 20 sec exposure showing the trails and a longer one with no real issues.

could this simply be the cables trailing and causing some drag as I didn't loop them up?

I also moved the mount with out the weights on a couple months back and had a horrible crunching sound. Could it be Gear problems?

 

Thanks

Stuart