Mounts that use a worm drive are the easiest to adjust for backlash; your C8 presumably has what

is called a spur gear drive or something similar, and it probably does not have a way to adjust the meshing of the gears. Backlash is the free play left in the gear train when that gear train is properly adjusted and tensioned. There will always be some backlash; you can't make gears infinitely tight or they will destroy each other from friction. The higher the quality of the manufacturing, and the better the quality of the materials used in the gears, and the more intelligently those materials are chosen for how they interact with each other, the smaller your backlash can be, but there will always be some left. When you are guiding, you are making very small movements of the motors (and therefore of the gears that connect the motor to the RA and Dec axes). If there is some backlash, and it is not compensated for, no movement will occur -- the motor will turn, the first gear or two will turn in response, but the free play between gears will eat up the movement. backlash compensation works by spinning the motor rapidly for a very brief time, just long enough to take up the slack in the drive train. This compensation is ONLY applied when you are changing direction, so the system has to have a way to track what direction the gears last moved, too. So it's not found on many inexpensive mounts. That makes two reasons why it may not be present: the cost of keeping track of direction in the mount hardware or electronics, and the cost of making the gear mesh adjustable. If you have the backlash compensation set too aggressively, then the motors will spin to long, and they won't just take up slack; they will cause some degree of actual movement of the scope. If you have the backlash compensation set too loose, then the motor won't spin enough, and you will get less movement after a direction change than you will when there is no reversal of direction. This makes it very hard to guide the mount -- the result of a guide correction changes depending on the direction of the last change. Some software, such as maxim DL, have software backlash compensation. This can be used to supplement the compensation available in your mount, or to act as the sole method of compensation if the mount has no built-in backlash compensation. To set backlash compensation for imaging, you need to move the mount in the type of very small increments used for guiding (and at guiding speeds), so that you can determine whether the amount of movement is the same whether or not a reversal of direction is occurring. You always want just a hair too little compensation; you never want even the slightest bit too much, or you will get a jerkiness that can lead to spikes in your images from excessive, unpredictable guiding errors. You shouldn't need backlash compensation in RA; you would almost always choose a guide speed that is less than the sidereal rate. That's why you want the mount loaded slightly heavy to the east side; the gears will always be meshed. At a guide rate of .5x sidereal, the mount will still be moving at half speed in the usual direction even when it is moving "backwards" with

respect to the stars to make a guide correction. So backlash compensation is really only an issue for Dec corrections. In extreme cases, you can deliberately mis-align away from the pole a small amount, so that the guiding corrections in Dec are also always being made in the same direction. You'll need a fairly brief guiding interval to make sure that this technique does not introduce a jerky motion into the guiding process. But it is in Dec that reversals of direction can occur, and if you have your backlash compensation set properly in Dec, then it will make instantaneous changes to deal with guiding corrections. If it is too loose, then you will go through multiple guide intervals before the correction occurs, since the system is slowly taking up the slack in the gears. You wind up with a large, single correction and that shows up as a guiding spike proportional to the amount of backlash. If the backlash is too aggressive, then the mount will overshoot with each correction, and get into a wild back-and-forth oscillation that will create spikes on both sides of stars. Now, in addition to backlash (strictly speaking, referring only to looseness in the gear train), there can be other free play in the system that will cause problems, and mostly these other problems cannot be solved by backlash compensation. For example, in a worm drive, there can be end play in the worm. This will actually cause the mount to start moving in the reverse direction to that expected, then a brief pause, then the mount will finally move in the direction desired. Since guiding corrections are brief, only the reverse movement actually occurs. So when a worm has end play, the symptoms are really badly erratic guiding. Other drive designs have their own adjustments, but only slack in the gear train, as far as I know, can be dealt with using backlash compensation. I think I've just written the overview for the guiding chapter.