ASIAir Pro + AM3 autoguiding not working

woof

Please help me debug autoguiding issue.

Equipment: AM3, Asiair Pro, Nikon Z6, 300mm lens, Asi120mm mini, 240mm FL f/4 Svbony guide scope.

The mount was bubble-leveled and polar aligned within 30". Exposure for 30 sec produced round stars, 60 sec ok, but 120 sec quite bad.

I turned on autoguiding. It turned the round stars into lines. I double checked the guide scope to be very solidly attached to the AM3. I tried med and high gain. I tried 0.5s, 1s, 2s and 4s exposures. I tried 5%, 50%, 70%, 100%, 200% aggression. I tried 500ms, 1000ms, 1500ms, 2000ms calibration steps. I tried bin2 on and off. Nothing works. The guiding just turns dots into lines.

I am attaching 2 phd2 log files. The 2024-08-04 one has calibration, but it was just for fun, no images taken. The 2024-09-02 log file has all my experiments. I did recalibration at least once. But the calibration for some reason is not in the log file.

Thanks in advance for your help.

phd2-guidelog-2024-08-04-000929.txt

13kB

phd2-guidelog-2024-09-01-230029.txt

90kB

PMTeam@ZWO

woof Hi. Please recheck the polar alignment to see if it's still within 30". Also, confirm whether the total weight of your telescope setup exceeds the recommended limit for the AM3 without a counterweight. If it does, we recommend adding a counterweight.

woof

I will retry tonight. The weight of my gear is

Nikon 300mm lens: 3 kg.
Nikon Z6 + FTZ: 1 kg.
Svbony 240mm f/4 + ASI120MM Mini, 1 kg.

Does this require counterweight?

woof

I have fixed it. I explicitly syncd the android location to the mount. Then before autoguiding calibration, I had to plate solve to sync the ASIAir with the AM3 and turn on tracking.

It would be good to include these instructions in the ASIAir user's manual, device and app.

Astrop

It isn't in the instructions because you don't need to explicitly do it. For me I simply power on, focus, PA, send to home, then slew to near celestial equator, calibrate, then start imaging.

You're supposed to calibrate near the celestial equator for best calibration.

It's likely when you started autoguiding the tracking switch under the mount settings was turned off, you'd know if you looked at the guide screen and saw stars moving across the FOV, this means tracking is off.