So everything worked last night but the seeing was awful. It started like the previous night with total PHD2 guiding numbers around .8 then progressively got worse until I hit 1.9 (!!!) by 3 am.
Stars were consistently shimmering to the south and all of the bright stars of Sagittarius were twinkling. When watching PHD2, the guide star would sometimes move dramatically enough to see it move on the screen. I've seen much worse nights, but it was pretty awful.
I turned on PEC and I assume it helped? I dunno. I didn't have that weird issue from the previous session.
The focusing strategy worked pretty well and I only needed to focus once in the middle of the session. At the end, I could tell it was getting slightly out of focus so to hedge my bet, I added hand warmers around the lens cell. Partly I was doing it because it was getting noticeably humid, but I thought it might mitigate focal length change as well.
It's always something with astrophotography.
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