Chen, WOW sorry to hear about that power outage. Same story in Texas I guess. HAHA yes I know about the frustrations of trying to type, using the screen of a tablet, or Iphone as your keyboard !!
Anyway I'll post my experience of last night here for you to consider, and I'll wait to hear back when your better able to respond.
We had a few hours of reasonably clear sky last night before the clouds ahead of today's latest snow storm ended the night. It was certainly a night of very contrasting guiding experiences. I again used my Iphone to do my PA and quickly got to 30 arc seconds, and the simile face and the fireworks display. I again only mention that as a very obvious difference to my Samsung Galaxy 10 Tablet where I have never gotten that display even when my PA was far better.
Once I was PA'd and done a sync to mount, I switched back to my tablet, because of the much bigger screen size. I slewed to M-42 simply because it is currently perfectly located from where I can locate my scope due to the snow. The mount found it, and centered it perfectly. I then set up a test Autorun sequence. Last step was to calibrate a guide star then hopefully start guiding and imaging. I was able to calibrate and get the sequence started but then immediately ran into the same guiding problems as I have been having. Lost star, huge swings in RA and DEC, etc. A total mess. I tried tweaking ( lowering ) the aggressiveness setting which were both set to 55. I ended up with the DEC at 40 and the RA at 35. But still that made no difference. Essentially I was unable to guide. So I shut down the Samsung and tried switching to my Iphone.
BINGO! Immediately there was a HUGE difference. I was able to start the guiding, and it stayed reasonably stable. I then added a dither every 5 shots and started another Autorun sequence. I was able to run two sequences targeting different objects in different parts of the sky. The bottom line was that the total guiding error stayed mostly between 1.00" and 2.00" . It would vary up to around 4" after a dither, but then fairly quickly settle back down to the 1" - 2" range within 30 seconds or so. It often was slightly below 1.00 as well.............. Now I know that for you, these are not great guiding numbers. But for me, with all the problems I've been having they are outstanding. My RA fluctuations were typically very tight around the 0 line of the graph with most of the error coming from the DEC adjustments. Lastly I even set up a third short sequence that required a Meridian Flip. Everything went perfectly. After the flip the ASIair found a new guide star, I believe re calibrated, and in a few minutes started guiding and then continuing with the imaging.
OK so what's the difference? The only thing I changed here was moving from my Samsung Tablet to my IPhone12. I know your going to say that should not make any difference, but I am seeing a huge difference, and now for the second time!! The fact the the Tablet does not show the Fireworks PA display which initially to me was only worth a comment, is now is suggesting to me that there clearly is some difference here. I checked to make sure both the tablet and Iphone show the same FW and they do, 1.5.3............ It seems that the upgrade to the ASI120mm mini FW I did a few days ago at least has not put me out of business. However I am not at all sure if it has helped at all however.
OK so does any of this make any sense to you? My thought is to uninstall the ASIair app on my Tablet and then re install it. But I am just shooting in the dark.......... Since the next few days will be snow filled I won't get another imaging chance until the week end, so I will wait to hear from you before I do anything else Good luck with your weather related issues out your way And of course good luck to our latest Mars Rover as if goes through it's 7 minutes of terror about 3:45 PM my time today Al
