[JohnH]

Thought I would share the journey with you. My latest experiments with guide parameters - faster slews, shorter slews, backlash adjustments etc etc have not yielded any significant improvement in guiding accuracy. I still get egg shaped stars....I did a run last night with the guiding outputs turned off.

The result is attached. As you will readily see I did not bother with accurate polar alignment for this run - so there is significant DEC drift.

I ran the mount off a battery and did not use TEC on the guidecam, I only had the guideport on the mount connected to the PC and only one USB connection - all to eliminate PC load and electical noise.

There are two things worrying me here. The DEC motor was off and yet there are step changes in the DEC trace and the RA trace shows jumps also. Exposure was 2s.

Is this slippage somewhere (clutches) or is it backlash. DO I need to unbalance in DEC as you do in RA to keep the gears loaded?

Your advice/input would be appreciated - I am runnig short of things to tweak...