Finally, a few clear nights in a row- here's andromeda (now up to 1 hr integration time)
http://imageshack.us/a/img525/3553/1hrtifrgb.jpg
and the Orion nebula (2 minutes or so)
http://imageshack.us/a/img692/3126/orionzi.jpg
The tracking mount, while extremely user-friendly, is definitely a big step up. First, the total weight of everything is now about 100kg- I have to let the system 'settle' into the damp ground for a minute or so to stabilize, and moving it around ain't trivial. Second, while the polar alignment step really couldn't be much simpler- a newbie like me mastered it after 2 or 3 nights- my backyard has a lot of mature trees, severely restricting the number of places I can set up and directions I can look after alignment. Lastly, because it's cold out, I have a problem with focus drift as the lens cools down. It's not a problem *if* there are bright stars in the field of view, but for Andromeda, I have to rotate the lens, re-focus, and then use the setting circles to get me back to where I was.
However, the biggest difficulty I struggled with (and still struggle with) is weight balancing- it appears that the declination axis (analogous to longitude), which holds the mounting dovetail is asymmetric: there is a front/back orientation that must be used, otherwise the declination axis will experience a fairly large torque when looking toward zenith. I didn't find any mention of this in the manual, and I spent quite a few nights cursing fairly loudly before I figured it out.
With Orion, I played around with different acquisition times- 30s is a little too long, leading to frames lost due to 'wobble'- here's a tight crop of 9 successive frames:
http://imageshack.us/a/img7/8118/montagecgo.jpg
Of the 9, maybe 3 are acceptable. This is *not* due to atmospheric seeing problems. Seen as an animation, the stars undergo sinusoidal oscillations in one axis (right ascension, I think), and a slow drift in the other. I think this is 'periodic error correction' and 'declination drift', neither of which I can easily correct. So instead, I just use shorter exposures- 10s seems to give me a >80% acceptable image rate, and is still long enough that I don't have to worry about burning out another shutter anytime soon.
