Had some 'Mount Capers' to deal with before I did this test run on a bright nebula in Scorpius, IC 4628, some 2700 light years distant.
I had setup the mount and telescope a night or so before and found some of it's Auto Guiding (locking onto single stars to stop the mount slowly drifting off target) behaviour problematic.
With some spare time Saturday I proceeded to pull the offending DEC axis apart to inspect and clean the worm gear as pictured below. I also discovered a huge (relatively speaking) gouge in the metal rim where one of the worm adjustment grub screws, after being tightened too enthusiastically by myself at some time in the past, had dug into the metal rim that is supposed to hold it in place to go no further. Pictured too is the offending rim after a 'jury rigged' patchup with Loctite glue and a hard vinyl strip.
The long sad story cut short here sees a happy ending with the resulting image from last / yesterday (Sunday) night where I was quite happy with an improvement in tracking and guiding and took just over 2 hours of data ( 27x5 Minute Frames ). I have combined and enhanced them in PixInsight and Photoshop to bring out the vivid red colour of this emission nebula.
The last image is of the ASIAir (My imaging and Mount controll computer) App screen with a single raw frame and you might notice the red and blue wriggly graph lines at the top near centre which tells me how the mount is behaving while auto guiding. The closer and more superimposed those two lines and the smaller the numbers next to them are the better!
For my ancient 20 year old (albeit upgraded) Skywatcher EQ6Pro Mount. not too bad. If you have made it this far reading this thanks and hugs!!!
