What will take you longest to figure out (1 Viewer)

[Tracy]

And I'm discovering, that when doing DSO imaging, it will be the balance point for your scope & equipment on the mount, and the weights to keep your RA & DEC in a reasonable level. It's amazing how much a small difference in where each is mounted can affect your tracking.
Once you HAVE found the sweet spot, don't be hesitant to pull out that ever trusty Sharpie and mark it on your telescope rail (Vixen in my case) and on your weight bar. On my bar, I'm going to go a little further and once I know where it is for the weights for my current ZenithStar 103mm, I'll be using a scribe to draw a line into the finish and mark it with a number, so I know it's specific to the scope I associate it with that number.

I've been thinking I had a mount issue (and I may still have one, but once I got things better balanced, my RA & Dec seem to hold better around .4-1.7.

The secret is, don't get frustrated. This is not an "immediate gratification" hobby, and the nearest I can compare it to long distance rifle shooting. You don't simply pick up the rifle and start hitting the bullseye every time. You have to learn windage, elevation, Coriolis Effect, temperature affects and more, breathing, trigger control and more before you can start putting lead on metal at 1000 yards and more.

 

[Tracy]

This has been a night of trial and error for balancing.
If I can get my EQ-35 Pro to do this consistently I’ll be happy. There is an issue with the RA and DEC getting worse when score points almost directly up and weight are parallel to ground, but I think that may be some slippage in the mount and the fact I’m running a heavy loss, probably near Max for the mount.

 

[OhNo]

If you take the roller of your mouse you can flatten the line, and it seems to lower the total RMS. You can also go to the lower ight corner and change a bunch of parameters. While not ideal these parameters can compensate for balance issues. I would balance your scope for the direction you shoo most frequently and adjust the parameters to get the best guiding (for me it is mostly NE). Is I shoot SW (my worst guiding area) I re-adjust the parameters to get the best guiding.....

Here is a image of what my presets are. (Remember you have to save these or they will revert to default).

 

[Tracy]

Not that much different from mine... so far, shooting to the north and east I have no issues... it's when shooting overhead and then to the west I find that I have to make some adjutments.

This is what I'm running now with about 2 hours of tracking and captures.

Just a simple screenshot of the SM FITS viewer of what it looks like right now with my Luminance run going.

 

[OhNo]

Your image is pretty darned good. Did you let the autofocus do the focus? You've captured the dust nicely so your gain/offset and exposure length for this bright target are right on. Looks like you'll need to learn how to do mosaics with that scopes FOV.

SM Schedule script works well for mosaics. It takes a fair bit of brain HP to figure out how to use it though. I lack in the brain HP department BUT I make up for it is stubbornness and determination to not let a machine beat me...... You need any question answered just ask........