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Thanks Gary, I will try to get those requests sorted.
As to random looking data. I now think you are right.
Last night I did a drift polar alignment and it was out, drifting in just 2 minutes. So I drift aligned until it was 20 minutes on each axis. No more stuffing around with that. I will not be trusting Tpoint until I get the pointing issue sorted.
Then I checked for flex as Rally suggested. Non on the telescope, connection to mount or camera connection to the scope. All really rigid. I am really satisfied that this is ok too.
Next I took out the flattener and just tried mapping with the camera and scope at native focal length. Same results. North South separation and then something occurred to me.
On my mount if I stand with the RA pointed towards me and I gently grab the counter weight bar there is noticable slop in the RA axis (I am talking 10mm here; up and down perpendicular to the axis); so if you are holding the bar and the scope is say laying over in RA I can move the bar up and down by 10 mm. My camera is set up so that long axis of the sensor is perpendicular to the Dec axis. That should make the north at almost 90 to the RA. Would this slop account for the north south separation? When I took the face plate off some time ago I noted that the whole worm and gear move as one and that the assembly does not appear to be bolted to the body fo the mount, it sort of floats. Is this normal? I would have thought that this sort of slop would prevent good pointing. I think this is most likely the cause of the problem.
Gary, the odd thing is that many images are ok on the astrometric solution in CCDsoft but they get rejected in the sky or Tpoint (not sure which is rejecting, but I get the message in automapper that it has been rejected.. I get two main errors; insert WSC failure and cannot map. Last night I got 140 errors and 93 positives on one run. That means there is something really wrong physcially. Often the circled star in CCDsoft (the star being pointed toward) is all over the place. Sometimes near the cross hairs, but most often at random distances and places from the cross hairs. I think it might well be the mount work that was done before I bought it that is causing the problem.
Hope that makes sense.
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