I have an AM3 that I picked up in January 2024 and gave me good guiding performance up until recently and was hoping someone might have some suggestions on how to troubleshoot. Essentially, from January - April of this year, I was able to achieve guiding with error well under 1" regularly. Unfortunately when I got back to astrophotography last month, I was finding that I had really poor guiding in RA only - in the neighbourhood of 2-3" but often with much larger spikes. Dec is fine.
So far, I've updated firmware; run guiding assistant and calibration; eliminated seeing or obstructions as a source of the error; paid extra close attention to polar alignment; looked for cable snags or other obstructions. Right now I have no idea what to do next. Since I last had 'good' guiding, I haven't changed my rig at all - everything is in the same place as it was in the spring and in fact, i didn't even take the mount off the tripod. Just can't figure this out.
I've uploaded the guidelogs for two nights - one in Jan which was my first night with the new mount and honestly, things only got better from there until recently. The second file is last night's log showing the issues.
Any help sure would be appreciated!
Thank you!
