Thank you xthestreams and wotalota.

So... last night I tried alignment again and it sort-of worked. I noticed that I had not previously "parked" the mount before doing the alignment. After I did that step, it seemed to work. IMO, when you say "start" the application should check if the mount is parked, if not it should ask you if you wish to park or abort.

After I parked the mount, it solved the sky and gave me an arrow and told me to click on a star. I did that. Then it asked me to adjust alt/az to center the star etc. I don't know if that means to center it in Kstars or center it in the photographic plate that I can dynamically refresh/update. Also, my Celestron 8300 camera doesn't seem to cooperate with any binning other than 1x1 in the alignment application, giving me bogus "pictures" if I do anything other than 1x1. This makes doing "real time" adjustment of alt/az virtually impossible, as I have to wait about 30 seconds between "frame" refreshes. It's a work-night, so I called it quits at that point. BTW, if I remember correctly, my 8300 does binning just fine in the photography section, so I'm not sure why it throws a tantrum with binning under alignment module.

Anyway, I'll play again tonight and see if I can make progress with alignment.

My "eyeball" alignment, btw, was only about 1 degree off. So... I tried guiding again just for kicks. Same thing, when it tried to do RA negative, it just gave up. After I get the alignment spot-on, I'll try again.

To answer the helpful questions y'all asked: I'm using the Celestron-GPS driver for my Celestron AVX, though I don't have the GPS module installed. Also, location and date/time and DST seemed OK (at least last night).

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