I hope this is not a repeat topic. Is tracking or guiding the most important metric in your astro setup? I understand that some mounts track better than others. In your opinion which should be your primary focus. Thanks
Is tracking or guiding the most important metric in astro setups?
If you're (severely) undersampled, no. If you're well or even oversampled (so deconvolution works as good as possible), then yes.
I have yet to see a mount that does track well (by which I mean smoothly sinusoidal) but doesn't guide well. And some don't need guiding at all.
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The key to this question is the difference between tracking and guiding. Guiding fills in where tracking has error.
If you get a high end mount with encoders and properly train it, you’ll realistically never have to guide for shorter focal lengths. For most folks though, we’ll just use the example of an EQ6R, the most popular mount in the hobby…
The EQ6 has a periodic error without correction around 12-16 arc seconds. Once PEC is in play, we can get it down to ±/- 6 arc seconds. On average at 500mm you’ll be sampling around 1.5 arc second. Here you can interpolate the basic math-we can’t keep up. This is where guiding comes in and follows the star, provides input and corrects for the periodic error.
Now, you compare this to harmonic mounts like the ZWO’s that have substantially more periodic error….guiding has to work much much harder to keep up with the error. They also ultimately require better seeing to really perform on par with a normal EQ mount. The folks you see that have these amazing guide graphs from their AM5’s are typically under good seeing conditions, but once the seeing goes to crap, so does the mounts guide performance.
Anyways, my answer is tracking. A mount that tracks well will guide even better because there are less variables in play. Gear mesh, balance, periodic error, and seeing conditions are ALL variables that affect guiding. If you can remove or mitigate any of those variables, you will have much better guiding performance. Tracking performance is a purchase, guiding performance is something you can tweak, tune, provided you have good skies.
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I think what I reading is too fine tune polar alignment as precise as possible and take advantage of all your mount has to offer and then tune your guiding.
Your setup description mentions an AM5, right? So with this mount you’re bound to aggressive guiding (0.5s exposures or faster) with many small corrections anyway.
Apart from those two you forgot anpther very important variable, IMHO, and that is polar alignment…
Both come into play for me. Probably because I had a bad mount and struggled with it. But I did eventually manage imaging with it.
Now, I have a much better mount, and my guiding is much better, too. But they go hand in hand.
So, when my first mount died cold on me after 3 ½ years (I think rather premature), and my CFO told me to wait 4 months so she could get through Christmas expenses’, I had 4 months of research time to find my next mount. And she about choked when she found out what that delay would cost her. But I have my forever mount, and I don’t want for better.
So, Tracking gets you following along and is important. But guiding is the fine adjustments to really shrink the stars down. Tighter stars are from better guiding.
Here is a tracking video from my first mount: https://youtu.be/2rOOZ9Hu8_0?si=Y8ObshaftRevJeJv No guiding.
But her is my typical, stacked and unprocessed images now:
📷 Horsehead and Flame Nebulas
https://app.astrobin.com/i/pytjxh/
Sure, there are no end to massages one can do now. But how much frittering does one want to do?
So, Tracking and Guiding are very important to me. I upped my guidance a couple of years ago, bigger guide scope, much better camera.
When both work together, the teeny-tiny stars come out, and the details of the object show without heavy processing.
So, I say both are important. To me, this is a journey of refinement. Not one of how can I fix this?
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