Is anyone else getting erratic streaked stars from their HEQ5 Mount?

With my HEQ5 I have no problems with 900 second exposures but a friend of mine had problems with 300 second exposures for example. His problems were similar to yours.
In his case the problem is that he tightened the clutches too little.
He also had another problem, which was that if he did the polar alignment again after an hour it was completely wrong even though it was good at first. In this case the problem was caused by the registers not tightening enough.

Thanks to those who replied.  From the low count, this doesn’t seem to be a common problem and may only be on my mount.  I’m posting the full details to put an end to it.Firstly this is not a mechanical problem, it’s actually an electrical problem on my mount.  More precisely it’s an electrical noise problem which is interfering with the communications between EQMOD and the mount’s control board.  This electrical noise is generated by the processor and associated circuitry on that board.This noise is getting into the communications receiver because the metal casing of the mount was not properly grounded to the negative terminal of the power supply.  This can be easily done by connecting a short piece of wire from one of the small screws holding down the plastic top cover, to the outer ring of the DC Power connector.  A more permanent connection can be made inside the plastic box that houses the ON/OFF switch and all the connectors.I take no responsibility for you causing any damage to your equipment, under any circumstances.  My mount no longer has any sign of comm’s errors and my stars are perfect.  Good Luck.

Sorry Haakon, do you want a pic of how the piece of grounding wire is connected?

Neil

I had very similar issue turns out only a slight amount of wires rubbing (not entangled at all) against the tripod caused this on my HEQ5. I had this issue for a month and along with it came differential flexure as well.  Recently I changed the position of my ASIair to be mounted on the OTA so that none of the wires attached to the camera are hanging/touching anything. This is how I had my setup earlier and did not see any issues with 600s exposure. But since I moved the ASIair to be mounted on the mount, and hence the wires hanging, even with 180s exposure I was throwing away 30% of my images.

Its amazing that it only takes very very slight drag on the main camera for the stars to trail or suddenly move (the kind you were seeing). 

Edit: Seems like you troubleshooted the issue to an electrical problem. Please do post some details. Thanks.

Hallo Neil,

Thank's! I will try to do as you have described. I have always wondered about the high frequent  sound from the mount. Perhaps it is gone after doing this.

CS
Haakon

I had similar issues when I used Wi-Fi adapter for guiding (I didn't have a suitable cable at the time). To make things worse, both mount and astro mini PC were connected to indoor router and not to each other directly. I had huge peaks on guiding graph every time I used a microwave oven in the kitchen and every time a large file was downloaded. Eventually I switched to an EQMOD cable and that of course solved the problem.

Just in case there are some doubters, I took this screen shot during last night’s capture which shows how good the guiding can be on an HEQ5 Pro.  My mount is overloaded as you can see and had to extend the counterweight bar by 40mm.  Obviously the guiding doesn’t stay this low but bounces around to the low 0.7’s especially when the wind gets gusty.  Hope you get the best from your mounts this weekend.Clear skies and good guiding,  Neil