Hello all,
If I had hair I would most certainly be tearing it out by now...
This is one of those "it was working perfectly last night" type of problems!
HEQ5 Pro seems to have developed a tracking error overnight.
Over the last few nights I've been gathering 15min Ha subs of the SMC with no problems at all - last night after going through a slightly longer PHD calibration, the guidestar decided to leave the green box and head slowly off out of frame. I decided to just observe the error, and each time I centered the guidestar in the PHD window, after a couple of seconds it would quite rapidly head off toward the top right of the window.
I recently tried to tune the RA gears as there was a bit of play in the axis - all seemed to be well...after tune-up, motors responded instantly to controller commands (ie no backlash). I can only assume that this tune up has caused some problem with the RA tracking. It's almost like the sidereal rate has been altered in some way - is this possible?
I used this tutorial as a guide...
http://www.astro-baby.com/heq5-rebuild/heq5-we1.htm
I also noticed that when I use the GPUSB Nudge program which allows small movements in RA/Dec - the RA movement was much slower than the Dec. Once again pointing to an RA problem?
Anyone have any ideas? This is driving me mad!
Cheers
Doug