Yes that guiding screen does not look correct it shows guiding there was movement and then no correction. Once i get calibration to work mine guides well i am too using a 14 inch scope a meade ACF. The only time you should get a display movement and no scope movement is if its in the dead zone area setting but i can see 5 pixels set so that should be ok, One think i do see different to mine is in the guiding rate box on mine there is no guiding rate option name just guide rates like 1x,2x,4x i normal used 1x or 2x try that.
Mike
Hi Mike
Thanks - I think an important difference between your 14" and my 14" is that mine is Dobson Alt/Az mount and yours is a fork Alt/Az mount. My guess is you have considerably less backlash in your mount (hence the $7000 difference in retail price ). And yes, I've tried different guiding rates, it does not help. I have also tried adjusting backlash compensation in the Synscann app - also doesn't help. My thought is either need to upgrade the mount or figure out a novel mechanical solution to reducing the backlash in the gears. I do know one chap in Italy who put his SW 14" Dobson OTA on an EQ8 mount, but at that stage, I think it would make more sense just to upgrade to a Mead ACF 14 inch or similar - let me know when you are ready to sell As is think I've pushed my Dobson to its technical limits for AP and will meanwhile have to be content with guiding with ROI, better than nout!
CS
Mike https://www.astrobin.com/users/MikeHuerto/
Last edited by MikeHuerto on Sun Aug 14, 2022 11:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
The mounts a celestron cgx-l equatorial so a good mount and would recommend it needed a large mount for the weigh as it sits on there with a williams gt81. The meade I got second hand as a ota only from a sky at night presenter, only thing that let's my system down is guiding I use oag but finding star to guide on a pain at this mag , makes a mount flip at night hard as guiding can't find a star to continue.
I can't see many planet via my garden so do in the mai DSO.
So looking at a onag in the next few weeks seem may help a lot with full view guiding.
I am using feature tracking for my solar timelapse. In 3.x sharpcap the feature tracking is pretty much useless with the high contrast feature tracking.
But the new center of gravity tracking seems to work well. How ever you should make the software to stop guiding if there are lost of visual cue (passing cloud). Since if there are passing cloud then the guiding just goes haywire.
there is a new feature which might help here - a minimum contrast level adjustment for the center of mass tracking mode. When the contrast range of the image drops below the level specified here, SharpCap should stop detecting a center of mass position and stop making tracking adjustments. The contrast range is measured as the difference between the 10th centile and 90th centile of the histogram. By adjusting this appropriately, it should be possible to get guiding to stop when cloud comes across...