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During my last couple of observing nights, I have had some trouble with my autoguiding. The problems have mainly been along my declination axis. I figured that there might be several reasons that my declination axis drifted so much I lost my guide star on several occasions.
loose attachement of guidescope causing autoguiding issues
I have chosen to mount my auto-guide scope on the side of my L-bracket. Attaching this without an arca-swiss clamp proved more difficult than anticipated. I managed to get it reasonably tight having fixed it with some zip-ties.
To get rid of the travel of the scope I decided to go back and see if I could get it fixed even better. So I disassembled the L-bracket and fixed the guide scope with 4 zip-ties.
Having attached the guide scope like this helped in achieving far more stable guiding resulting in far longer exposure times. I got some ideas for attaching my guide scope from Peter Zalinka’s video on guiding. I went from stable exposure times of 60 seconds through 120 seconds to 300-second exposures – in this portfolio post you can see the results of the new improved guiding setup.
