Making progress with the calibration routines.
After adding the straps, I no longer see the drift in RA. Odd, I now see some wandering in DEC.
Reran another 71 point TPoint. Supermodel again says to make small adjustments. Today (Sunday) I drove down and
– adjusted polar alignment again
– focused guider. Had to tighten the focuser tension significantly.
– adjusted the C11 so it now focuses closer to 3500 (3800 now). Made sure the mirror locks are pretty tight.
Yesterday, ran a long PEC data collection run. It showed 2.8 arcsecond variation. I think the seeing was better today, plus I got a longer run since it wasn’t drifting all over in RA.
Applied the generated PEC curve, and remeasured PEC. It was now a bit worse at 3.3 arcsec.
So, I reversed the PEC curve (turned off the “Collected when pointing West” flag. Applied this one, and now the PEC is a bit better:
Tried running a 5 minute exposure with TPoint applied (71 points), Protrack running, and PEC applied. Looks pretty good! CCDInspector shows a 9% aspect ratio – stars look pretty round. Since I expect to run only as long as 5 minutes with the Canon, this is pretty cool.