Successful calibration of the Auto Guider / mount pulse-guiding arrangement The key issue with all my failed calibration attempts was the hot pixels on the guide camera.
I had never done Dark images for the guider, so all previous guide calibration attempts still had hot pixels on the guide images. When running those previous calibration cycles, TheSkyX appeared to use the hot pixels instead of a star for calculating tracking rates.
Choosing a star field with very few stars for guiding, it became clear which area of the guide image was being used for calibration, and it seemed to be a single pixel. This highlighted several consistent pixels across multiple images and made it clear what was necessary. I processed an auto guide image for dark subtraction and subsequently had my first successful calibration.
With the guider / mount tracking rates calibrated, I can now work to optimize the guider settings. Current settings:
min move 0.010 seconds
max move 1.00 seconds
aggressiveness - all are 10
results:
M13 60 second clear, guided image
