SX Guider Advice Anyone?

My previous night out I had no trouble getting 10 minute subs with
my SX Guider: mount/guide scope was 8" LX90 @ f/3.3, piggyback scope
was Zenithstar 66SD at prime f/5.9. My guide head is still finicky
and will resort to these all snowed out and other funky images at
times. But other than that, was working fine. I have been finding
that just going with the calibration settings works very well.

Last night I tried shooting through the LX90 (f/6.3) and using the
ZS66 to guide for the first time. I have been warned that's much
harder. But when I did my calibration in AstroArt3 it went through
the routine then replied "telescope speed less than .5" and set the
X and Y speeds to 9.5. I attempted to use those speeds which was
almost a flat line for a minute or two, then just ran away. I could
not find settings that worked, even going down to .5 on each. I
also tried using a barlow per Lance's advice, but couldn't come up with stars or really
even focus when it was in place. Probably just didn't try long enough.

Of course, it could have been periodic error or random error or bad
balance, but was wondering if anyone had hints on how they handle
settings for such different scopes.

All this while I had a wonderful framing of the Bubble!

Thanks in advance,
Larry

Larry,

I don't have much experience with Astroart for guiding, but I know that I had problems changing between focal lengths when attempting to use MaximDL. After making sure that the focal length is set properly, Maxim has another setting which specifies how many seconds it moves the scope in each axis while it does it's autoguide "calibration".....at lower focal lengths, the move time must be increased so that it get a sufficient number of pixels movement to calibrate well.

Perhaps you also have flexure, as well?

All this being said, I have had sketchy results autoguiding with MaximDL, so perhaps I have no idea how to do it properly.

I go the easy route, and autoguide with my DSI Pro and Meades software. With that setup, I specify focal length, calibrate, and it always works fine, no other tweaking needed outside of aggressiveness.

Don't know if this helped or not...........

Regards,
Keith