Went out last night, no jetstream, a nice cool night, ambient at 8.5°, mirror within a degree.
Look through the eyepiece, WOW!
8/10 at least! Hurriedly set up the laptop, hmm what's this, the image won't stay in the FOV.
My EQ platform isn't working.. the stepper motor is making a loud "tick a tick a tick" noise that I haven't noticed before, and the roller than drives the top plate just doesn't appear to be making contact. The top plate seems to just be slipping and not being driven.
Tried everything between 11pm and 12am last night, just couldn't get it working. Something's broken, it seems.
Sooo frustrated because I missed an almost perfect evening of seeing to get some great images, because my tracking wasn't working
And now I've gotta figure out what's wrong with it and Fix it/replace it/burn it.
No images from me for a while
The only upside is I had some great eyepiece views of Jupiter in very nice seeing.