My objective today is to take advantage of a nice day to set up the GM8/TV, and capture full disk solar images with the 60Da. I also want to capture three sunspot group closeups with the ASI290.

Polar alignment was by the smartphone apps only. With that I got moderate but controllable downward drift, so I would have to say that the slewed to the target and was tracking adequately. I did test backlash and found about 6 or 7s of backlash in each axis. Now that I am balancing east heavy and tail heavy, tracking (and I assumed guiding) go pretty well no matter how much backlash is present. It is an annoyance that I would rather not have to live with, but I just don’t know at this point how to adjust any better until I get one-piece worm blocks.

Today it was quite breezy, perhaps even moderately windy. At my working image scales I didn’t notice too much of a seeing problem until I zoomed in on a sunspot to focus, then it seemed pretty bad.

After imaging the sun I set up for a collimation check when it starts to get a darker.