Hello,
Today I had my first autoguiding experience ever. Internal guider.
SW AZ-GTi mount. 30F4 MiniScope with ATI120MC-S for guiding. AT72EDII with Nikon D5300 for imaging.
The good news is that it worked. Ekos was guiding.
The bad news is that the guiding was pretty rough.
I set the guiding accuracy to 4 (from 2) arcsec, everything else was left to defaults.
Maybe the polar alignment was far from perfect or the mount was just too flimsy,
but the deviations were sometimes so large that the guider would have to stop and select a different star and start over.
As a result, 2/3 of the images were bad with the mount moving by a large distance while acquiring an image (60 sec exposure) - see attached image.
Please advise on how to improve. (I am guessing that the "guiding rate" can be important here. or the accuracy).

Thanks!

Hi, first try to solve the other problem you reported on polar alignment, this might be related with that problem
as the camera hanging downloading images can cause this guiding "jumps".

Yeah, I agree with @NMAC. Get your PA solved first.

But one thing a lot of people do wrong is crank up the camera gain. This may help if there are no bright stars in the FOV but in general all this does is cause the guider to lock onto faint stars. keep the gain down - like 50%, you don't want the stars saturating - so that the guider locks onto brighter stars with more SNR.

Like I said - that was my first ever autoguiding experience and I was just happy that it worked at all.
I was just a bit frustrated (but not surprised) to see so many bad frames in my sequence..
I'll experiment more when the sky is clear again.

Not sure how to fix the PA problem though...
(Last time I did PA with synscan app before going into Ekos - it was reasonably good).

Thanks!