[Octane (Humayun)]

Cheers, Mario. : )

Chris, as Mario mentioned, the tracking should be on. You want to see how well/poor your mount is tracking.

If you ensure that your guide camera is aligned north-south, east-west, the star should move either left and right or up and down. You don't necessarily need to worry about which direction it moves in as all you're concerned with is seeing /some/ kind of movement so that you can make adjustments to your mount and compensate.

As for measuring the actual movement, you can use an on-screen reticle. I use StarTarg as I like that I can move it around and enable a timer on it to monitor star movement vs time. You can also enable the grid and/or bullseye in PHD Guiding, or, perhaps even use our own Al Sheeny's on-screen reticle software that he's so kindly given to us for free.

I use the standard double-line reticle that StarTarg provides and by using the timer, measure the amount of time it takes for my star to cross from the centre of one reticle line to the next reticle line. For example, if it takes 30 seconds to move, I make a known adjustment (such as one complete turn of the azimuth knob) to my mount, put the star (or another star) back on the centre of a reticle line, and measure how long it takes. If it now takes 15 seconds for the star to move the same distance as it did previously, then, I know that another complete turn of the azimuth knob in the same direction as I moved it before, should get me pretty close. Then, it's a matter of fine tuning (and not forgetting which way you moved the knob!).

The best thing you can do is to make a large adjustment the first time around, otherwise you'll be sitting there scratching your head wondering if the star is moving less or more or not at all. Typically, for me, this means 2-3 rotations of the azimuth knob on my G-11.

H