After the last few nights I give up. These things are junk and or my camera is. The only direction I can get anything close is at Andromeda and the opposite direction at near the same height when I hit the Orion Nebula. Anything anywhere else cannot be hit with any success.
Last night added a new problem of a dead GPS unit when I arrived at yet another distant shooting area. I tried numerous new batteries and was gonna go back home when a good tap on the unit brought it too life.
I have re-calibrated regular and precise calibrations dozens of times in slow and fast motions, I have done it with 180's in one and both directions and full 360's in one and both directions. It will alter the compass readings a bit but still fails.
I have changed locations by 10 to 15 miles in case someone had buried a giant magnetic UFO under where I was shooting or the nuclear plant 10 miles away was affecting me. I have tried various tripods, lenses, chants, standing on my head etc to get this to work.
I have tried it with and without the battery grip, different batteries in the camera and the unit. In the unit I had no choice because it eats them in under 2 hours.
I have tried various lengths of time and while shorter is obviously better it still doesn't work.
Last night I could not get the usually working 50mm to track at all until again aiming at the Andromeda Galaxy. I then switched to the 500mm and it still worked:
Until I switched it a bit South to the Triangulum galaxy:
And don't ask what that banding is because it happens every time I use the 500mm with this thing and I have no idea.
It was perfectly still on a hard packed road and no earthquakes ongoing. Using remote and mirror lockups etc.
Now one strange note that makes me suspect the camera SR is part of the problem. I shot this last night as well with the 50mm so this is a 100% crop of Praesepe i think it was:
I took the camera off the tripod to give up and decided to rotate it in a manner to force the SR to rattle to all corners and sides of its travel area and put it back on and got this:
Though I could never repeat it again while trying to figure out if it was the camera.
I am at a loss with the remaining possibility that the camera and gps unit are both quality control nightmares. Even if it is the camera the failure to even start the gps unit last night without repeated love taps tells me it has issues as well.