Kevin_A My guiding earlier before this happened was about 0.5rms but after I re did my guiding and it picked a big star too… it went up to 0.7rms average.
That is what I would expect.
Remember that I'd mentioned earlier that your autoguiding is now limited ("tall tent pole") by something e;se other than the sawtooth. I.e., in this case, bad centroids are being computed.
I tried to have it pick other stars by moving slightly off target
In the good old days, we can pick different stars by adjusting the bolts in the guide scope tube rings, or with x-y stages with fixed tube bands. You don't even find the x-y stages being sold anymore.
https://www.sciencecenter.net/hutech/borg/guidescopes/attnov08.pdf
(By the way, that article is written by Craig Stark, the author of the original PHD. Even back then, nobody would use a 30mm aperture "guide scope" with 4 arc seconds Dawes limit -- but ZWO will sell you one.)
Nowadays, it is easier, since we have larger cameras (much larger than the miniscule guide cameras back then). But things like ASIAIR have chosen to cater to the novices ("Easy..."). And they believe that the simpletons cannot learn anything new, and be capable of picking their own star distribution.
(If you haven't noticed, ASIAIR is not conducive to learning. I don't know how these addicts will learn anything about astronomy.)
So, those of use who use ASIAIR will need to work around the crippling. In this case, purposely steering the gain of the guide camera to purposely saturate a star or two. To get more even distribution, especially in the star dense Milky Way, I often increase the gain to purposely saturate 3 stars, just to exclude them from swamping the centroid weighting.
Just tune the gain so that the brightest star that is picked does not scintillate between saturation and non-saturation.
Chen
