I haven’t been out for a while so not able to continue smoothing my learning curve with the EQMOD. But when you can’t get out to play, why not spend the time learning new techniques and catching up on the forum chat.

It was while I was reading through the forums that I found this link from Sander Pool on the Yahoo Autoguiding site: http://www.ewellobservatory.com/bestpractices/player.html

Make sure you have a spare 45 minutes before clicking the link, I found it very informative and even though the target audience are experienced astronomers, there’s a lot of very useful information here for us amateurs as well.  In the presentation there’s a reference to FocusMAX and CCDInspector, both of which are available here: http://www.ccdware.com/downloads/. I don’t have an auto-focuser (yet) so haven’t downloaded FocusMAX but I’ll have a look at CCDInspector if it can help me collimate my scope.