I tried aligning from way back under the trees, no northern visibility at all. Lined up the tripod by aligning the center post with a leg on a heading of 000° using my trusty 50-year-old Boy Scout compass (magnetic declination is negligible here). Slewed to visible sky at about 130° az and 35° altitude. Ran the PAA, the azimuth was so far off the triangle didn't even fit in the camera frame. Wound up running it for three or four cycles overall, PAA said 40", PHD Guiding Assistant said 2'. I'll take that!

Star still wasn't tracking the triangle, however. No matter, since the helpful circle guided me to the correct adjustments quite easily, so long as I didn't go too fast. Racking the azimuth more or less followed the hypotenuse, but not quite. Altitude was of course about perpendicular to that. Mount was pretty close to level by the bubble in the base. Does sensor orientation matter? My camera was at some completely random rotation since I was mostly just playing around.

Chris and Hy, this is the nuts. Terrific work, and it will make a big difference to my imaging. Even when I don't have good targets in my available slice of sky in the back yard, I can use that time to debug hardware and workflow instead of infringing on valuable remote-site dark-sky time. Bravo!

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