Dark frames were not taken as purely i wanted to test the autoguiding. Focus was off and bright moon so i wasnt about to post it stars are abit oval not sure if this maybe caused from the rough polar alignment.
Autoguiding is not as easy as it sounds......as you can see everything has to be working spot on if you want to autoguide for any length of time.
Thats the complexity of getting good images...the more you can improve the tracking quality of your mount the more impresive your images will become.
To get nice round stars for exposures over 60 second is what you will strive to master over the coming months.
What settings did you use for guiding...there is lots of members that can help you in this department.
cheers Tony. It seems my stars are more rounded without autoguiding. Ive set autoguiding speed to .25 , backlash at 5500 for RA and DEC (not sure if this is correct) how would i find out what backlash should be set to?
Regarding backlash just leave it default at the moment...your the only one to see backlash...I have some backlash in my mount but if it's not to bad it's not a problem at all...play with the settings.
How about all the settings under guidescope...????
Whats your guide star doing...do you see it slowly return to it's centered position or does it go to far...you want the eroor corrections to be very small.
thx Tony. Using Envisage to autoguide. The guidestar appears to stay dead centred though? it is very weird but these elongated stars happen before autoguiding also . I was hoping autoguiding will get rid of it but....
You are at a very high mag. First establish which direction the stars are elongated. My bet is in declination. Overcorrection can lead to this problem.
G'day Eric, I tend to agree with Bert. You seem to have dec drift and this is most likely caused by incorrect dec backlash compensation, and also perhaps, too long a time interval between guide corrections.
The other image unguided that you linked to is the result of out of balance OTA I believe. And that might be part of your current problem as well. It would be interesting to know what your guide exposure time is? Not sure what you mean by 'guide speed=.25. Is that aggressiveness or guide exposure time? Not sure what you mean by RA backlash. Guide corrections for RA typically either speed up the drive, slow it down or maybe even stop it briefly. It is not usual to actually reverse direction of RA, so backlash would not be an issue. Depending on the brightness of your guide star, you might find guide exosures of 2 to 8 seconds should work well for you. From Memory, I was using an aggressiveness of one or unity, values over that seemed to cause the guiding to oscillate and cause all manner of mischief.
You are at a very high mag. First establish which direction the stars are elongated. My bet is in declination. Overcorrection can lead to this problem.
Bert
Cheers Bert. The stars are actually elongated everywhere from top left to bottom right. They are not elongated from just one direction eg dec.
G'day Eric, I tend to agree with Bert. You seem to have dec drift and this is most likely caused by incorrect dec backlash compensation, and also perhaps, too long a time interval between guide corrections.
The other image unguided that you linked to is the result of out of balance OTA I believe. And that might be part of your current problem as well. It would be interesting to know what your guide exposure time is? Not sure what you mean by 'guide speed=.25. Is that aggressiveness or guide exposure time? Not sure what you mean by RA backlash. Guide corrections for RA typically either speed up the drive, slow it down or maybe even stop it briefly. It is not usual to actually reverse direction of RA, so backlash would not be an issue. Depending on the brightness of your guide star, you might find guide exosures of 2 to 8 seconds should work well for you. From Memory, I was using an aggressiveness of one or unity, values over that seemed to cause the guiding to oscillate and cause all manner of mischief.
HTH,
Doug
Cheers doug. oh my guide speed is the speed that the EQ6 is set to when guiding. my guide exposures are 1 sec. i'll go and recheck my ota balancing.
thanks.
I have found the source of and treatment of DEC and RA tracking errors to be different, I suggest therefore that you try this, polar align as best you can and turn DEC corrections off. Adjust your guiding params to get good RA compensation. Now turn on DEC comp but only in one direction (opposite your residual drift).
You do not need good skies to practice this stuff so don't wait for perfect conditions....
It depends on your guiding software. I do not know envisage's guiding capabilites but if you cannot disable there then you might be able to stop the signal getting to the mount at either the Shoestring adapter or the virtual LX200 s'ware.
stars are abit oval not sure if this maybe caused from the rough polar alignment. 
