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Hot take: my tracking mount photo came out sharper than my guided one last night
I tried shooting the Orion Nebula with just my old Star Adventurer mount and no guiding, something I normally avoid. To my surprise the stars looked tighter than my usual guided shots with PHD2 running. Did I mess up my guide settings or is a simple unguided setup sometimes better for short exposures?
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paigep201mo agoTop Commenter
my tracking mount photo came out sharper than my guided one" umm WHAT. That makes zero sense to me unless your guide setup is actually making things worse somehow. Maybe your guiding is chasing the seeing and introducing more error than just letting the mount track on its own.
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grant_foster791mo ago
Maybe your guide camera has a tiny sensor and you're guiding on a star that's getting blurred by bad atmospheric dispersion. That can happen with cheaper guidescopes and color cameras where the star looks like a little rainbow smear instead of a clean point. I've seen people swap to a monochrome guide cam and suddenly their images stopped looking mushy. Another thing nobody talks about is the flexure between your main scope and guidescope changing during the night as the temperature drops. That little shift adds trailing that won't show up in your guide graph at all. Worth checking both of those before you ditch guiding completely.
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