[Paul Haese]

Imaging with my RC12 via MaximDL for guiding and in OAG configuration.

Dec axis is perfect for guiding. Hardly moves off the centre line. RA goes up and down in an apparent sine wave.

This I have looked at:

1. Balance :near perfect and what it should be for a PMX.
2. PEC: on and PEC off, neither impact.
2a. I have protrack (skyX) on and that helps smooth out the errors.
3. Guide rate in SKYX: only seems to smooth out a lot when I have that set to 1.0-1.2 of sidereal. Weird. Anything near 0.5% of sidereal and I get really erratic behaviour.
4. In Maxim I have min move set to 0.04 for Dec and 0.05 RA as per calculator I used.
5. In Maxim I have max move set to 1.0 for both axis but have tried settings as low as 0.13.
6. aggression does not changing this at all, just slows or speeds up the changes. Currently set to 8 for Dec and 7 for RA.
7. Guide exposures set to 4 but have used as much as 10 seconds.

After a lot of reading I thought this might be mount oscillations caused form incorrect Maxim guide setting, though now I cannot think what the problem could be since playing around this these settings and finding these were about as close as I could get.

There does not seem to be any looseness in the mount at all. I had considered I may have installed the new worm incorrectly.

Effectively I get slightly elongated stars along RA in nearly all my exposures when pointing toward east but better results when pointed west (about 50% of images pointed west have round stars).

I have included my log file. As you can see there is little movement in the X axis being made to adjust guiding. Yet movement in the X axis is moving around. Seeing is generally good. Perhaps my settings are still wrong.

Any ideas?