Post meridian flip

[Manuel Shaw]

Did everything per what was laid out in your analysis and still end up with bad guiding.https://openphdguiding.org/logs/dl/PHD2_logs_teen.zip

[Bruce Waddington]

Based on your rather terse comment, I suspect we're not on the same page here.  The point of my advice in the previous message was to get to a point where the PHD2 guiding results could be trusted and could help to shed light on what's wrong with your setup.  Nothing is going to get "fixed" this way.  Your problems aren't caused by PHD2 or by guiding, they are caused by problems with your gear.  That means you will have to commit to spending time to understand the problems and find ways to correct or mitigate them.  If you don't want to do that, we can't help you.

I think the Guiding Assistant session you ran provides some clues, as it typically does (RA in red, Dec in green):

Remember, this data is all being captured with NO GUIDING.  The first thing that stands out are the large tracking errors in RA.  You can see there are fairly rapid excursions of 15-20 arc-sec.  You haven't said anything about what kind of mount you have, is it a strain-wave mount?  These are known for poor native tracking accuracy but this looks worse than usual. If it is a strain-wave mount, you won't have the luxury of using 3-sec guide exposures, you will probably be limited to 0.5 to 1.0 second exposures in order to guide aggressively enough.   However, the Dec data show unexpected excursions as well, some of which are on the order of 5 arc-sec.  In this case, the Dec motor in the mount wasn't even running.  So there are a couple of possibilities:

1.  You had truly horrible seeing conditions, perhaps because it was hot and you were set up in an area with a lot of heat convection or

2.   The guiding assembly you're using - meaning the little finder-scope arrangement that is probably stalk mounted - isn't rigid enough for the job, maybe because of vibration or flexure.  With your setup, even with the different guide camera, a 5 arc-sec guide star excursion can be caused by a shift of the guide camera sensor by less than 4 microns, a truly tiny amount.

So which is it?  There's no way to know, you will have to figure it out.  

Bruce