3AC9bx99 You are certainly right about that. I have been saying that I think declination drift is the root cause of most folks' capture rate problems, not backlash and not new firmware as is often expressed on this and the FB forums.
I imaged NGC2244 at a declination of of 5 degrees with a 20sec exposure which resulted in a 61% capture rate at 20sec. which is the improvement I expected from my usual 40 - 50% capture rate for that target at 30sec subs In addition I imaged M81 @Dec 69deg, Leo Trio @Dec 13deg, M101 @ Dec 54 deg and M13 @ Dec 36 deg to round out my test of objects at different declinations, all at 20sec subs and all over a period of 2 hours each. Capture rates were 100%, 95%, 99% and 93.6%, respectively. At 30sec the capture rates go down as the cosine of the declination, as they should if PA Error is the primary source of rejected frames, which is the case for me. So, again I don't think firmware upgrades has much to do with any immediate changes in capture rates.
If one is having trouble with capture rates, my suggestion is to look somewhere else besides the latest firmware updates, otherwise you may never get to where you want to be. The first place to look would be in the PA accuracy in conjunction with the declination of the object being imaged.. Unfortunately, the SS App only provides feedback to a single decimal place which means one can be off by 0.4deg and the SS will report 0.0 as I mentioned above.
As the data I reported here shows, if you have done the best you can at PA and are still getting lower capture rates than you want, lower the exposure time. In a typical light polluted location I believe that you will get just as good of an image with 2 hours of 20sec exposures as you will with 2 hours of 30sec exposures. The only difference between these two is the read noise, which are the right gain setting will be vanishingly small compared to the light pollution Shott Noise. The same number of photons hit the sensor in 2 hours of 20sec exposures as in 2 hours of 30sec exposures and, the Quantum Efficiency is the same. 1 photo x QE = 1 electron regardless of the exposure time.
