Kevin_A
Yes of course I always play around with the gain. It always depends on where I am. Here in Switzerland in the mountains, we have some places with very dark skies. Sometimes I need gain 80.

I deliberately opt for a strong dithering of 30px. I only see advantages here. I have to cut the picture a little anyway, although the RedCat 51 and 71 deliver very well.

You have already gained a lot of experience in this thread what do you think about the diagram of my AM5. Mine was produced at the beginning of this year and if you compare it with last year's models, it doesn't look so smooth to me.

MarcK your partial graph only represents a small portion of the complete period length at the highest PE area and not the full period. So it is bascally useless in reality to a point. However, based on that partial portion you would probably benefit from 0.5s guiding due to the many smaller fluctuations. Looking at the complete period I would bet that the whole period length is similar and rapid small corrections will do well to correct it. The roughness is typical of all 288s period mounts from zwo these days.
Looks ok to me, scary shape as usual but typical.

Kevin_A
Thank you so much Kevin
Then I'll have lots of settings to test in the near future. I will definitely compare the difference between 0.5 and 1 sec exposure time. I hope we get good weather again soon - at the moment it's always cloudy.

I find it very unfortunate that ZWO is not speaking up in this thread and leaving the work to the people like you who have experience with this optimization. ZWO should really use the information from this thread to inform new users with a tutorial as an example.

MarcK you welcome. I have not had very much clear skies either recently. Maybe 2 nights in the last 60 days here in Canada. I am not sure why zwo has issues with tailoring the software to help strain wave mounts run better, nor why they do not offer guidance towards better settings for their own mounts. Maybe they do not understand their own mounts and the engineering fundamentals is farmed out and the resources and knowledge is not relayed back to tech support. Then again, other manufacturers seem to be thin on guidance too. I have learned a lot from people much more knowledgeable than myself and combine that with my own research and then pass it forward to others so the knowledge bank grows. Cheers.,

MarcK Sorry for your dissatisfied. If you have any trouble with ZWO's products, you can contact our support to get help.

Kevin_A
The same here the summer was already bad and from fall until now it was hardly more than a handful of nights. Since I started with a few large panoramas, it will take some time until I have collected enough data.

I also had problems with Plate Solve - the system was constantly getting lost and no longer knew where it was. Sometimes nothing helped and then, as if by magic, everything worked again the next time. Currently I only have the problem that the correct object is not named in the autorun, every object is named Polaris.

The problem is obvious: with AsiAir, ZWO wants to appeal to a wide audience. But with more compatibility comes more and more problems. Instead of solving the problems, new products are constantly being brought onto the market. It will be fun when an AM7 comes along, which will appeal to a different audience.

There can be problems with any product. It just depends on how the manufacturer reacts.

ZWO can now benefit free of charge from our experience in optimizing guiding. And the only right thing to do is to inform the users. A blog post with a tutorial would be the first step. Simply inform that this type of mount behaves differently, explain the correlations and name new standard settings as a starting point.

In a second step, this must be transferred to AsiAir. If an AM5 / 3 is connected, other basic settings must be displayed and, over time, further options for optimizing the system.

ASIMount@ZWO

Really wrong answer!!!
Please read my last post.
Then please take this whole thread and send it to the developers and marketing.
There are now over 500 posts in this thread with a lot of information you can never get by testing on your own. Just benefit from our help and make something good out of it we all play in the same team.

At the beginning of this thread, it would be appropriate for ZWO to speak up in the next few days and make a clear statement.

mountainair

mountainair
Hey
I do hope so, because I am selling a AZ-EQ6 and bought the AM5.
I was happy with the AZ-EQ6 Performance but not with the weight.
Having to drive 1 hour one way to a dark sky location and setup a big mount it’s starting to take a toll.

I hope I can get the same guiding performance with the AM5, with the biggest scope I currently have which is the Esprit 120 refractor.

MarcK
Why do you think they don’t react here ? They didn’t read the 532 post on this thread. They are too busy doing who knows what. And even if they wanted to use the knowledge that you guys accumulated here … they just don’t understand what you’re talking about! Honestly I doubt they designed their mounts. It’s like their refractors. Someone else designed it for them and that guy is not here on the forum reading our posts.

MarcK
You mean … easy as 1,2,3 ?
If you have some time to browse through this forum you’ll see that the whole place is a testament of what ZWO is capable in terms of customer service. It’s not brilliant, to say the least.

Here you’ll find some users with VERY high level of knowledge in astrophotography, electronic engineering, coding and computer engineering in general ( don't count me in, I’m just an ignorant person).

When you have a so strong base of users who are so dedicated (passionate ! ) about the products you are making money from and you can’t listen to what they say … that’s a waste you can’t afford for ever.

As I said before, it’s not that they can’t hear, but more a lack of basic understanding of how their own products works. Just see how many times they reply complete nonsense in the comments, before disappearing for weeks…

Kevin_A Thank you for responding, Kevin.

I had a typo in that post. My guide camera is a ASI120MM Mini. It is sitting on my desk now waiting for tonight.

I have read your past posts that reference focal length of the guide scope and pixel size of the guide camera being the two factors that dictate the Calibration Step. When you make ballpark calls for people like you just did for me, is this using lots of experience with Phd2 or is there some formula I should be using to get a good sense of where I need to be?

Just making a few small changes from this thread and my Total Error is down to under 0.7". I would have never thought this possible. I am going to keep working on this. Thank you Chen, Kevin, and everyone for contributing. I also asked ZWO for a CSV file of all data points from 0 - 360. I am sure they will ignore this request, but I wanted to give it a try.

w7ay

This is just about the math Chen. I would appreciate some guidance on this from anyone here.

Regarding #3.

My slope was 0.15 or 15 arc-sec/sec. I assume to get the Max RA duration I would do the following:

Max RA = (2 * 15 ) / 0.5
Max RA = 60

Is this correct?

Gagan yeah, mine did not like to guide on the other side of the meridian last night too. The main guide star looks a bit too wide so that might not help. I sometimes look at the main guide star and if it is not good I restart guiding again so it picks a new star. You could be running into a bit of bad atmosphere too as the skies are a bit turbulent. I also find that the counterweight might be an issue when you run a light scope like a Rokinon 135, so I don’t use it for my 135 f2 setup. I found guiding at 0.5s better last night than my usual 1s.