[AdamJL]

Originally Posted by Startrek

Adam,
from 1 minute to 10 minute sub exposures where guiding is an absolute must

Hi Martin

This is the bit that confuses me, because when I shoot, I've been able to hit 4 mins without a guide scope. Short focal length definitely in my favour as you say, but all I do is a polar align and then I frame Jupiter in my DSLR screen and make sure it's centred (there's a cross pattern to help me). Once that's done, I just go to my target and it tracks pretty well.
Mount is a EQ6-R

Originally Posted by Startrek

I was referring to alignment when you use EQMOD and Stellarium to navigate across the night sky , not Star alignment using a Synscan handcontroller etc...

Thanks. For Star Alignment I use the SynScan Pro app (haven't yet connected everything to Stellarium or NINA) on my PC... it's the same as the hand-controller, right? That I don't even plug in anymore.

Originally Posted by Startrek

Not quite sure what you mean by track for 4 minutes unguided ? Tracking on what ? And what frame of reference ?

Confused again (not hard!)
Tracking on whatever my target is (usually nebula) on my EQ6-R. Not sure what you mean by frame of reference

Originally Posted by Startrek

We usually test out polar alignment on a bright star say magnitude 0.75 to 2.0 and good polar alignment keeps the star stationary in the centre of our reticle for at least 3 to 5 minutes until you see some drift but again this at a certain image scale where the star is “zoomed in “

Good tactic, thanks! I'll try it out this weekend if the weather holds.