Just watched them both. Very informative thanks.
just one question though (well two). Why do you still use PHD2?
isn't unguided imaging what been setup with Dec Arc model?
does guiding enhance the tracking quality? 

also is the sidereal rate now custom?
Best regards, in confused state,

Matt

I have plans to potentially eliminate guiding at some point in the future.  It's not a priority, since I'm set up to guide all the time (I have an OAG and guide camera permanently attached to each of my imaging cameras).  It is literally zero effort to guide.

I've been running down some other problems that have been a bigger priority.  I live in an area with high winds (at any time of day or night).  I'm about 2.5 miles away from a wind farm, and boy did they find a good place for the farm.  20mph to 30mph winds are quite common, even over night.  I've pretty well nailed down the weaknesses in my setup, so that it's now pretty resilient to the wind.  But it took a while to get here.

But we had a great stretch of about 90 clear nights through the summer and fall.  I found myself so productive, especially after troubleshooting and managing the wind effects, that I wasn't motivated to do more testing and experimentation.  I just wanted to spend some time gathering usable data.

I would note that there's nothing wrong with running the guider, even with very accurate tracking.  I have PHD2 configured to wait a decent amount of time between guide corrections.  So the guider isn't actually doing much.  When I'm feeling like I want to tweak things again, I'll probably switch to unguided for testing.

I would note, though, that I don't yet have an observatory with a pier that's set deep into the ground.  I am using a portable field pier, set on top of the ground.  Part of my wind mitigation was adding paver stones with a fairly deep footing of packed sand.  I'm probably close to the frost line, but not deep enough to fully avoid frost heave.  We've not had any good imaging nights yet this winter, but I suspect that frost heave could potentially affect the polar alignment through the night, depending on the temperature and rate of change.  The guider will correct for this.

As for the rates, the tracking model sets custom rates.  You can see the custom rates on the screen in APCC.

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On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 02:54 PM, Brian Valente wrote:

https://youtu.be/wL-hpGQxCGw

Brian/Wade/AP,

Thank you for putting this together. Very much appreciated!
Todd