News from the EQ8 - Guiding problems

Hello Mr. Kloß,

I'm back with a rather pleasant insight into this unpleasant problem, which is also being hotly discussed in various forums.

1. I followed your advice and then moved the mount in RA/DEC for a longer period before taking the images.
=> This reduced the reject rate (guiding outliers in DEC and/or RA) from about 50% to about 20%.

2. About a month ago, I disabled the "AUX encoders" via the hand control.
=> Since then, I've been able to track for nights, sometimes with 60 minutes, without any problems. 0% reject rate with a total of about 30 hours of exposure so far.

The encoders are not mounted dust- or dew-proof, so small water or dust particles probably keep accumulating. For positioning, be it slew or guide, the internal firmware (NOT the HC!) obviously uses the very rough and often incorrect information from these unfortunate encoders. The deactivation is PERMANENT, meaning that once deactivated via HC, the setting remains even after powering off. There is NO influence on auto-homing via HC - as claimed in many forums.

As a positive side effect, the accuracy of the initial goto after 'autohome' also increases after disabling the encoders. The error used to be 1-3° with active encoders; now the error is significantly smaller.

I'm writing this to save other users of this otherwise inexpensive and mechanically stable mount the misery of a long search on rare clear nights :-)

Best regards,
Andreas K.