So after dark, I went out and discovered that the first two
It completed the calibration and I had it lock on a guide star... my gosh there are a lot more stars to choose from using a guide scope vs my TOAG (Orion's Thin Off Axis Guider). To my utter surprise, the history graph showed what I will refer to as a heartbeat sequence. That is tiny (ie less than 1/2 pixel) motions followed by a truly remarkable momentary large correction in a very repeatable sequence... like a heartbeat monitor. In using the TOAG I have never seen this behavior - usually PHD is doing corrections almost constantly. The first good image was started at 0015 - almost three hours later. <sigh> I have yet to process the images (I just got up from the all-nighter). But NGC4631 (a galaxy) and surrounding stars appeared in the images to be pretty crisply defined.
That is the story of last night. I do have one question though - for those that use a separate guiding scope and a barlow on the imaging scope - do you use the imaging scope or the guiding scope for plate solving? I could not get Astrotortilla to plate solve my imaging scopes images. But it worked fine on the guide scope images. If this is the case, I will have to perfectly align the guide scope with the imaging scope.