On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 10:22 PM, Allen Ruckle wrote:

Terry, 
    I am surprised to see the tracking you report as being .5 arc Sec. 35° above the Southern Horizon and .8 seconds of arc at 23° above the Horizon.
It would seem to me that if the Mach II mount with the encoders that almost completely eliminates all periodic error would have that much tracking error.

   Does the atmosphere produce that much error?  I share an observatory with a friend who has a 14.25" Newtonian f5.6, fork mounted with a 11" Byers gear on the RA and a SiTech II drive corrector. We  have gotten guiding with PHD-2 of .21 RA and .27 Dec  rms. using the Tik management feature.  The Observatory is located at the SDAA dark sky site in Tierra Del Sol about 60 miles east of San Diego at about 3600' elevation.

   I am waiting to be notified that the AP Mach2 I ordered last year.   I have been thinking it would have more accurate tracking than what I already have access to.   am I going to be disappointed?

Allen, The atmosphere creates significant star movement in my less exotic locale (at 155M in Vermont under the jet stream).      And what I'm reporting is guiding (i'm actively guiding), not tracking.  So your .21 and .27 results in around .34 arc seconds total (root of sum of squares).   What I report you should compare to the .34.    I think almost all of what i see is the atmosphere and some due to my lack of precision in setting the right guiding parameters and some over-correction, that which then needs to be corrected.   Plus, I am a portable mount, and about the best polar alignment I get is around an arc minute, maybe a bit less, but this will result in some drift that needs correction.  

Since I've never owned another A-P mount, it's hard for me to compare.   Comparing to my old mount, it's significantly more controlled.. to where I feel I can start honing my guiding and A-P skills rather than continually account for idiosyncrasies of the mount.


Terri