I am using Celestron Edge 8 at native focal length (f/10) with 2600MC Duo.
PA is near to perfect.
I am in Bortle 3 skies, great clear stars.
Mount = zwo AM5
Using Asi Air Plus for autoguiding
Problem
But when I try to setup auto guiding, it not able to calibrate or start guiding. I can hardly see any stars, the only 3-4 stars I see are blurred out.
Focus is neat, I use zwo EAF and the imaging train is capturing very good images in preview (2s exposure) mode.
But guiding censor (120mm mini inbuilt DUO sensor) is not recognizing clear stars. I keep getting the error "Star lost", "Unable to find guiding stars".
Sometimes it catches one guiding star, but doesn't guide more than 3-4 steps and fails.
Trouble Shooting:
I tried resetting the guiding (Clear last setup), and recalibrate. No luck.
I did try increasing Gain (high gain), no luck.
I tried increasing guiding exposure and tried 1s, 2s, 3s, 5s. No luck.
I tried pointing to objects like M42 where there are too many stars, instead galaxies, just to ensure there is no dearth of stars. No luck.
I tried changing Calibration steps from 500 all the way till 4000 (Dec and RA max values = 2000). No luck.
I tried calibrating at Celestial Meridian towards South (which is supposed to be the best), no luck.
Backfocus is perfect. Imaging camera 2600mc is giving good results when I do test exposures in preview mode, but not the guiding.
Questions:
Is there something I am missing? Anything needs to be done to enable inbuilt 120mm duo sensor?
Should I change primary camera sensor as 120mm and try getting images? Would that make any difference, since the main sensor 2600mc anyway is producing sharp results.
I am not able to even generate log results, as I am failing in the first steps where guide stars need to be recognized for calibration. Is there anyother log that gets generated?
Thanks for any lead and help.
