A little bit of success.

[saysme (Steve)]

By no means exceptional or by some standards even good but for me. I did the 3.28 B alignment on my eq6 and thought I would try how long I could get my exposures without star trails. It was only about 30 secs I thought it my have been a bit better but that was at 3000mm. Guessing you call it prime focus through a 2x barlow?? The images below are Prime focus (no barlow) with 30 sec subs inbuilt camera noise reduction however next time I'll take some darks as its got to be quicker. Stacking and editing in Lynkeos and file conversion in Camera raw. Would appreciate any pointers. Next time I will add PEC and try PAE (Pointing Accuracy Enhancement) and see what improvements I get. The mount held the calculated alignment as I checked after the camera went flat on a total new star.

[silv (Annette)]

great work!
only 30 seconds before trailing? that doesn't sound right!

however, you are a few steps ahead of myself who is still practicing alignment...involves a lot of :pray:

why are the stars so "blobby"? is that because you couldn't use the camera lens focusser?

[saysme (Steve)]

I'm not sure about the 30secs good bad or otherwise using the 600 rule I probably could have expected 0.2sec of untracked exposure so this is 150x better then what I'm used to, if it was an 18mm star scape the same alignment and tracking would probably be good for 8mins, but didn't try it. Globby stars, not sure probably over processing trying to get to much I have included a single frame of each image to get some idea of the original capture.

[CapturingTheNight (Greg)]

at 3000mm focal length you will almost certainly need to use an autoguider to get longer exposures. The best I have ever done without guiding and no trails was about 3 minutes with my NEQ6 Pro but that was with a focal length of 1600mm and almost perfect polar alignment. I would concentrate on getting your polar alignment spot on and only use your scope at prime (not with a barlow) if you are not autoguiding, before you try and go deep. On the plus side your focus looks spot on

[saysme (Steve)]

Thanks Greg, I DIY'd a larger wheel for my focuser on one side that gives me a little more finesse @ 1:1.7. I revisited my Collmination before last night as well- it was WAY out, nice concentric circles last night.