Newbie question about polar alignment. I was using the PA tool in StellarMate last night for only the 2nd time. I have a WO latitude base with an AZ GTi mount on top and am using the main camera - a Canon 5d2 for polar alignment (with a 400mm f5.6 lens). I started out ~4 deg off after the first set of calibration images. I selected a star and adjusted the base to move the star into the target circle (while zooming the image). After re-running the PA tool, I was still over 1 degree off. I performed a second set of adjustments that got me closer (22’), but then a third series of adjustments made it worse (45’). Each time I took a lot of care to hit the target. I finally just went with that out of frustration but couldn’t go longer than ~30s without elongated stars (unguided).

Any idea what could be going wrong? As far as I can tell, the camera and lens are solidly mounted. I can’t get any wiggle or twist at any of the connection points. And other than drift and PE while tracking I don’t see any other movement across multiple hours of exposures. I do have some very fun PE and drift verification in my stacked image as some hot pixels didn’t get calibrated out of the source images (in my preliminary stacking attempt with just a handful of lights and no darks). There is very obvious periodic movement across the image of the hot pixels.

In the screen where you start Ekos and connect to your devices there is a logs button. Please click it and make sure that it is set to verbose and file. Then also make sure that you enable the relevant INDI systems (I'd say at least mount and alignment) and then perform your polar alignment as you normally would. When you are done please add your logs as an attachment to a comment in this thread (click the "Go to editor" link to the lower right to be able to do that) so we can have a look at the logs.


Wouter