Hello, I’ve had my AM5 for about 7 months and suddenly guiding is off the charts. I’ll link the last few guide logs.

Set up:

AM5
ZWO 120mm mini guide cam
Apertura 30mm mini guide scope
ASIAIR
ZWO 533mc
Apertura 60mm refractor
EAF
The last 7 months have been pretty good. RMS at a glance from the AIR was between .5 and .8. Guiding has been so good I don’t pay too much attention to it, but last week on October 22nd something caught my eye after first calibration. Declination went just ran away. This was probably due to poor PA as I had no direct view of Polaris so I had to slew the mount off center to get a clear patch of sky.

Anyways, it seems since then guiding has been way off. I’ve always used default settings (8000ms cal step, 2000ms dec 2000ms Ra pulse) no problems.

I used to run the mount and air off a 3amp power supply but have since switched to a 12v 10amp for the AIR and 12v 5amp for the mount.

I have ensured that everything is tight and there is absolutely no movement on the rig. I’ve also changed calibration step down to 1700ms and dec/ra guide pulses down to 150-700. Sometimes this works great sometimes not.

I have adjusted Aggression up and down. None of it really seems to make a difference. I have been also calibrating within a few degrees of the celestial equator in the quadrant I plan on imaging that night.

Last night I thought was pretty successful with low aggression and low guide pulse (RA15% 150ms/ DEC25%/150). Things were going pretty good so I let it run. Well, I woke up to RA swinging around and RMS around 2.00-3.00. I changed some settings hoping to work through it but no go. Then, I thought maybe the heat coming off my dew heater was affecting guiding so I removed it, nothing changed.

I’ve scoured the forums over the last week reading everything including Chen’s post about the AM5 but nothing seems to stick.

Tonight, I will try mounting just the guide camera and scope to the AM5 just to narrow it down. I also plan using different USB cables for both cameras and also guiding with phd2 to see if there is a problem with the air.

This one is from last night.

phd2-guidelog-2023-11-01-193613.zip

899kB

When I first started seeing issues.

phd2-guidelog-2023-10-22-194723.txt

1MB

A good night from early this year

phd2-guidelog-2023-06-13-213557.txt

2MB